An Act of Empowerment: The Children, Young Persons and their Families Act (1989)

Abstract

Marie Connolly is a lecturer in Social Work at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, She has a background in statutory child abuse work, and is currently undertaking a Ph.D in the general area of child protection. SUMMARY In 1989, New Zealand introduced child protection legislation that embraces a model of family decision making. The model, based on traditional indigenous decision-making practices, has revolutionized social work with children and families in the child care and protection area. This paper considers the development of the legislation in terms of its antecedent factors and its vision. It looks particularly at some of the care and protection provisions of the legislation, and explores, by use of case study, some of the issues of using a family decision-making process as a practice model. Making New Zealand social services relevant to the people who use them has been an ongoing challenge for managers and policy makers. Sadly, however, in being true to the philosophy 'welfare knows best', social services have developed policies and practices which have alien ated children and young people from their families and have provided solutions that many would view as being more damaging than no inter vention at all. Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand who rep resent 13 per cent of the population but are over-represented in welfare statistics, have been particularly disadvantaged. In an article exploring user involvement in social services, Croft and Beresford (1988) sug gested that a disabling shortcoming of the welfare model is the concept of 'them and us'. They go on to consider the problem of the gulf between services and their users and argue convincingly the need for social service agencies to be more accessible and responsive to user