Allegations of abuse in care: The experiences of South Australian foster carers

Abstract

While it is vital that children are protected from abuse when placed in foster care, foster carers may also be subject to abuse allegations that are unfounded or unsubstantiated. Such allegations can have a significant impact on their wellbeing. Reporting on interviews with 28 foster carers, this paper explores how South Australian foster carers experience the care concern process. The care concern process is initiated when an allegation of abuse in care is raised and typically results in an investigation that is non-judicial. Thematic analysis of the interview data resulted in the development of four themes that span the initial shock of receiving a care concern, a lack of due process during investigations, relative silence following an investigation and a changed sense of self as a result. The paper concludes by considering other ways to engage foster carers in conversations that mitigate harm to all parties.

Plain language summary

For many different reasons, foster carers may receive allegations of abuse against them. In South Australia, such allegations are investigated by the statutory body, though carers cannot contest outcomes. This paper examines interviews with South Australian foster carers who had experienced an abuse allegation. The findings suggest that for many participants allegations were a shock, that due process was not followed and that following the investigation process there was silence from statutory bodies, leaving participants feeling a changed understanding of themselves.

Introduction

Australia has a long-documented history of abuse of children in care (Musgrove, 2016). From the theft of Indigenous children from their families (and subsequent abuse and wage theft as indentured servants), to the abuse of non-Indigenous children in orphanages, abuse in care has been a common theme in histories of foster care in Australia. Recognition of the rights of children to safety, however, has created something of a pendulum swing, such that those who care for children who cannot live with their birth parents are subject to far greater scrutiny than was true in the past. While such scrutiny is an important counter to a relative lack of scrutiny in the past, and while it is essential given abuse continues to happen in care, it can also lead to approaches to responding to allegations of abuse in care that are weighted against innocent foster carers. This paper reports on interviews with South Australian foster carers who were subject to abuse allegations and explores their experiences of the investigatory process.

In Australia, seven out of every 1,000 non-Indigenous children live in out-of-home care (72 per 1,000 for Indigenous children), making for a total of over 44,900 children living in out-of-home care (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare [AIHW], 2020). Of these children, 67% are in care long-term (two years or more), with the majority of these children being on long-term orders, meaning that they are likely to remain in care until they become adults (AIHW, 2020). The majority of children in long-term care are placed with kinship carers (i.e., a family member of their birth parents); however, 39% of children in long-term care are in foster care (AIHW, 2020). In the years 2021–22 there were 1,200 substantiated cases of abuse in care, these primarily being physical or emotional abuse, occurring across all out-of-home care contexts (AIHW, 2024). Unfortunately, figures are not provided on the number of abuse allegations made in Australian foster care.

In South Australia, allegations of abuse are referred to as ‘care concerns’ and can be raised by a member of the public (including a young person themselves), by someone engaged with the young person (e.g., a health professional, a teacher), by someone in the household or by the young person’s statutory worker. If a concern raised presents an imminent threat to life, the child may be removed from care while an investigation takes place (Department for Child Protection [DCP], 2024). If there is not an imminent threat to life, the child may be left in the placement during the investigation. When a care concern is raised and is deemed to warrant an investigation, foster carers are notified in writing and invited to a meeting where the allegations are outlined and the carer is given an opportunity to respond (DCP, 2024). The statutory body will then investigate the allegation, typically by talking to the child in question and to any other parties who may have information about the allegation. A determination will then be made about the allegation, in which it is either not substantiated, undetermined or it is substantiated (DCP, 2024). A substantiation can be minor, moderate or serious. Based on the determination, actions may then be taken to provide greater oversight to the placement, require the carer to undertake further training or in some cases to terminate the placement. Importantly, in the South Australian context foster carers do not have the legal right to request a review of a care concern investigation. A complaint can be lodged about the process, but this does not result in an audit of the investigation process or a review of the decision.

This lack of a right of reply or indeed transparency of the investigation process after the event is reflected in both Australian and international literature on allegations of abuse in foster care. For example, in the UK, in their survey of 3,352 foster carers, Roberts and colleagues (2024) found that only 25% of participants felt they received sufficient information about the process, and this lack of information compounded the stress participants experienced throughout the investigation. Minty and Bray (2001), in their interviews with 22 foster carers living in the UK, found that natural justice was routinely denied to participants, with information often withheld. Nesmith (2020), drawing on interviews with 19 foster carers living in the US, found that investigations often left participants feeling disempowered due to a lack of transparency during the process. Similarly, in interviews with 30 foster families living in the UK, Plumridge and Sebba (2016) found that a general lack of information about the investigative process and their rights during the process caused significant distress for participants. In the Australian context, few studies have examined the impact of allegations of abuse upon foster carers. Briggs and Broadhurst (2005), in their survey of 149 foster carers, found that even though most allegations were unsubstantiated, carers were nonetheless left feeling that their reputations were forever damaged by the allegations, and this was compounded by a process that lacked transparency.

Given the specificity of the South Australian context (i.e., the lack of legal right to request a review of an investigatory decision) and the relative lack of recent Australian research on the topic of the impact of allegations of abuse upon foster carers, this paper explores how foster carers living in South Australia experienced the raising of care concerns and the process of their investigation.

Method

Researcher positionality

The authors are two non-Indigenous people, one of whom is a foster carer. This author thus holds an insider position, in terms of understanding how foster care systems operate and the potential for abuse allegations to be made. Nonetheless, as an academic and researcher, this author is also an outsider in terms of having access to information about foster care systems to which other carers may not be privy. Both authors bring their extensive academic knowledge about foster care systems in Australia to bear upon the present paper, while also being careful to bracket off their own individual experiences where possible, mindful of the limitations of this given the imbrication of all aspects of our lives (i.e., we do not claim to be impartial observers).

Participants

The research reported in this paper was approved by the Flinders University Human Research Ethics Committee. Participants were recruited through foster care organisations in Australia, with posts made on their social media and through mail-outs to their membership. People were eligible to participate if they had provided care to at least one child, were living in Australia and were aged 18 years or older. Upon contacting the second author, participants were provided with a full information sheet, a consent form and a demographic form and were asked to return the latter two completed, when an interview time would then be scheduled. Participants were provided with information about support resources should they find the interview challenging. Participants were given a $50AUD honorarium in recognition of their time.

In the sample of 28 interviews, the majority of participants were women, three were men and one was non-binary. The majority of participants were heterosexual, with two reporting that they were gay, one queer, one bisexual and one pansexual. All participants reported that they were White. The average age of participants was 46 years (range 24–66 years). A majority of the participants reported that they were married, with five being single and four being in a de facto relationship. Most of the participants primarily provided long-term foster care; however many had also provided respite and emergency care, and two had also provided kinship care (i.e., caring for the child of a family member). Between them, participants had cared for 235 foster children (both current and former), with the average number of children cared for being four. All of the participants were current carers. All participants had experienced at least one allegation made against them or someone in their household and six had a substantiated allegation.

Procedure

All interviews were undertaken by the second author. Interviews were undertaken between January and March 2024 either via video call or telephone. Interview questions explored three key areas: (1) the nature of the notification; (2) the investigation processes; and (3) the aftermath of the process. Interviews were audio-recorded with consent from participants. Interviews lasted on average 58 minutes (range 44–106 minutes). Interview recordings were transcribed by a professional service and pseudonyms were assigned. Participants were given the opportunity to review their transcripts, but all declined.

Analytic approach

Aspects of interviews that focused on care concerns were collated and read repeatedly by the first author, following the approach to reflexive thematic analysis outlined by Braun and Clarke (2021). Through this process of familiarisation the first author developed a list of codes that represented topics repeatedly mentioned by participants. Having developed these codes, the first author then condensed them into themes. While codes depict a diversity of topics within the data set, themes by comparison represent higher order conceptualisations of the data, focused on moving beyond simply the semantic meaning of the data and instead also exploring the latent meaning of the data as it sits within broader societal discourse. The first author then selected indicative extracts from the data to represent each theme and developed the analysis below. As such, the extracts included are indicative but not exhaustive of each theme. Of the extracts included, approximately half pertained to substantiated allegations and half to allegations that were unsubstantiated but still investigated in some form.

Results

Themes

Four themes were developed, reflecting participant experiences from the beginning of the care concern process, through its investigation and following the determination. While this reflects the relatively linear nature of the interviews, the themes themselves speak to the affective dimensions of the interviews, with feelings about and experiences of care concerns not necessarily following a simple linear path.

An end to innocence: Care concerns as a shock

When asked to speak about their experiences of care concerns, most participants chose to speak about their first care concern, even when they had received more than one over the course of being a foster carer. This focus on a first care concern appeared to reflect how initial experiences of the care concern process were commonly experienced as a shock. Many participants spoke about a view of themselves as good people who would never harm a child, and thus the process of receiving a care concern notification was shocking and indeed an end to a previously innocent image of foster care provision in which they were not perceived negatively. For David, for example, when he was invited to an interview about a care concern, he was so convinced of his innocence that he was ill-prepared for what would transpire:

I went in there feeling, ‘This is nothing’. And they said, ‘Do you need a representative?’ I said, ‘No, no, no’, thinking it was nothing. And I walked in there and very quickly could determine that it was not nothing by their eyes. And there was questions they asked me about things that had happened, which I just very frankly denied. But I quickly thought, OK, so this – I quickly felt this is a witch hunt. You’re using this report as leverage to insert yourselves further into my life. So that’s how it played out very much.

David shared what could be read as a naïve account of care concern processes, such that he believed that his innocence would prevail. Instead, as he notes, he was quickly disabused of this assumption and instead came to believe that the care concern process was simply a ruse for the statutory body to insert itself into his life.

Similarly, for Kara, not only was she unaware that a care concern had been raised, but she also felt confident that she was a ‘loving parent’, and that the hospital where she was at the time were convinced she had done nothing wrong:

Kara: Well, I didn’t actually receive the notification until I was being interrogated. So it wasn’t really a, ‘You’ve got a notification. Now what’s going to happen next?’ It was, ‘Shit’.

Interviewer: So what sort of – right, so were you notified – were you taken directly from hospital into an interrogation situation? Maybe if you could tell me a little about what your sort of experience of that process was like.

Kara: I think, by not very long, the hospital knew that I hadn’t done anything. They were completely on my side and they were convinced that if bruising had happened, it must have been the birth parents, because I was a loving parent, I was showing all indications of doing all the right things. Because I was just being myself. And then I think one of the nurses came in and said, ‘[statutory body] is on their way and they want to talk to you’, and then she handed me a box of tissues and she said, ‘You’re going to need these’. She patted me on the arm sympathetically.

As it turned out, for Kara the investigation that quickly took place assumed her guilt from the outset – a deeply distressing experience. Kara was not only unprepared for the investigation to happen at that moment, but she also felt that in ‘being herself’ the truth would out. By contrast, the nurse who informed her that the statutory agency was there to see her appeared to be aware that the investigation was likely to be distressing.

Geri also spoke about being unprepared for the outcome of a care concern investigation, because she knew that the alleged incidents had not happened:

The bigger shock was it all being substantiated, because I just – I didn’t really believe it was going to get substantiated because, well, it never happened, so what evidence do you have? You just have to balance the probabilities. But apparently if it’s a 51% probability in that investigator’s mind that I did it, it’s substantiated. So again, you get a way better opportunity being a criminal to at least know what evidence you got against you and bring your own evidence in. But he wasn’t listening to that. I’m like, ‘Well, what about all the people in my life who have never seen me do this?’ I go on family holidays and on friendship holidays, they leave their children with me. They leave their high-needs children with me. You know why? Because they’ve never seen me abuse the children. They’ve seen me be caring, been loving, give everything to these children.

For Geri, her belief in herself and her perception that other people saw her as a loving parent meant that there was no possibility that a care concern could be substantiated. Yet as she notes, given that the investigation process is subjective and not bound by the normal rules of an investigation (i.e., disclosure of evidence), while she was shocked that the care concern was substantiated, ultimately, once she learned how the process worked, she was perhaps less surprised that such a determination could be made.

Being treated like a criminal: Lack of due process during investigations

As indicated in the previous extract from Geri, many of the participants felt like care concern investigations lacked due process, resulting in them feeling like they were treated as guilty until proven innocent, while at the same time feeling like they were not accorded the same rights as someone formally charged with a crime. As Dan notes, while in his care concern experience the person conducting the investigation spoke about ‘natural justice’, the process was anything but:

With these processes, the investigator kept saying, ‘This is natural justice, I adopt a natural justice approach’. But I was like, ‘No, you’re not’. Natural justice is where all the information is collected and all people have access to that information and all people can arrive at a just response. I had no access to any of the information, no access to what decision-making skills or tools they had used. So it felt so arbitrary. And because I truly went into this meeting thinking – the follow-up meeting for the first care concern, sorry – thinking well this will be cleared. Because if it’s natural justice, well, natural justice will show that I have done nothing.

Most certainly, care concern investigations in South Australia are undertaken within a legislative context, one that legislates for the statutory body and allows for the raising and investigation of care concerns. However, the investigatory process itself, unless it is deemed a police matter, is guided by policies developed by the statutory body. This means that the process itself is non-judicial and is not bound by normal rules of legal proceedings. For Dan, this left him feeling that the entire process was arbitrary and that while he had expected to be cleared of the care concern within a natural justice framework, in reality the lack of transparency about the process proved otherwise. Andrew also noted that while evidence was not presented during the care concern process, there was nonetheless an implicit threat that any evidence might be referred to police:

At a number of different points, my worker said, ‘Is this being referred to police?’ And they were very conditional in their response. ‘We’re not planning to. We don’t think that’ – so it’s the, again, this way of keeping you in a position of fear. So, again, these are courtroom tactics that are being used in a non-judicial fashion. And so it keeps you in a place of what if they do refer it? What if they do do this? But at the same time, they’re saying, ‘There’s no material evidence’. I’m like, ‘So you can’t refer it to police’. There’s no material evidence. Well, it will go nowhere. But at the same time, they try to keep you in a place of fear.

As Andrew noted, by giving conditional responses, statutory staff conducting the care concern investigation created a climate of fear, one in which a non-judicial process could potentially turn into a judicial process. Moreover, as Andrew notes, the potential for referral to police inserts the threat of legal proceedings into a non-legal space.

Kiera put it most simply when she noted that care concerns appear to operate on the assumption of guilty until proven innocent:

I think, particularly with the first care concern, but I think – and I’ve heard from other people too who’ve been through similar experiences of care concern experiences – is that it’s guilty until proven innocent, and that’s the default. If an allegation is made, you are guilty. And you are guilty, the child’s removed, that’s it.

As noted in the introduction to this paper, if there is a potential threat to life following a care concern, then a child is removed from the placement. Yet as Kiera noted, often the assumption of guilt was enough to constitute a threat to life, leading to children being unnecessarily removed from a placement during an investigation.

The quiet after the storm: As though it never happened

Given the enormity of the care concern process for foster carers, and the quasi-judicial approach adopted by statutory bodies, one might expect that following a determination there would be a marked shift in how foster carers accused of abuse are engaged with by statutory staff. By contrast, for many of the participants there was a sense of a care concern – even if substantiated – being treated as though it had never happened: that a determination was made and life should return to normal. Geoff, for example, noted that once a determination had been made, his support worker simply told him to move forward:

Not only do they not provide any support to the children during the investigation process, they didn’t provide any support to the children after the investigation process and they didn’t provide me with any support. So you get this letter that says, ‘We know this is difficult, but this is part of what we have to do’, and basically, the worker then said to me, ‘Well, that’s done and dusted now and we take that as case closed and we move forward from here’.

In a sense, it is positive that even a substantiated care concern is not treated as cause for alarm in some instances. As Geoff noted, it is a process that must be followed. Yet at the same time, when a care concern is substantiated, many participants rightfully felt considerable distress throughout and following the process, only to be told ‘case closed’. While participants who experienced a substantiation that did not result in the removal of children were thankful for the outcome, they nonetheless felt that they were left with considerable distress that was not addressed or even acknowledged. As Geoff shared, he was not offered any support at all. Louise also shared that once the investigation was over, ‘nobody talked about it again’:

Interviewer: I’m wondering, because you’ve touched on something here that I’m wondering a little bit about. Do you feel like this care concern experience, did it have any sort of – did it have any sort of longer-term sort of ramifications or impacts for you, good or bad?

Louise: It really just went away. Nobody talked about it again. It was weird.

While for Louise her care concern was not substantiated, she nonetheless experienced the entire process as disturbing and sought resolution. Any resolution, however, was not forthcoming, and indeed the silence following the investigation further compounded her distress.

Angela also shared an experience of being told that a care concern had been raised, only for it to be dismissed with no information given:

I was ushered into a waiting room and reassured that it was OK, they were just checking her out. And I said, ‘What have I been accused of doing?’ And they wouldn’t tell me. I asked ‘How can I defend myself?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, you can’t. You can’t defend yourself because we’re not telling you what you’ve done, what you’re supposed to have done. But don’t worry, we don’t think you did it’. And after maybe half an hour, I was told that I could come in and get [child], and so I went in and picked her up and they said, ‘OK, that’s fine, you can go now, what has happened doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. It’s all over, we’re not telling you’.

Again, while Angela was thankful that in this instance the care concern raised did not lead to an investigation, she was nonetheless left in the dark, with no information about what she had been accused of or how she might respond to the allegations. Given that her child had been brought to hospital at the time, Angela was rightly worried about the nature of the alleged abuse and how to support her child, yet the lack of information and indeed dismissal of the incident left her with no way to proceed.

Changed ways of being: Monitoring interactions

Given all of the interview material presented in the previous themes, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the participants experienced a change in the way they experienced themselves as foster carers going forward from a care concern investigation. For many there was a heightened sense of scrutiny: from statutory agencies but also from themselves. Participants reported that they felt compelled to monitor their interactions with their children, for fear of receiving another care concern. Jim shared examples of mundane parenting interactions that, post-investigation, made him question his actions and the possible consequences:

I find that I’m watching myself all the time. Like my two children have had a tiff and one child’s got a bruise on his arm from the other child. And I think ‘Oh, crap, is someone going to notify about me?’ The other day, one of the children was messing around, and I said in a firm tone of voice ‘We need to go now’. And this is a child who is autistic, who is very sensitive, and he said, ‘Don’t yell at me’, and I said, ‘I didn’t yell. I just said to you we need to leave’. And my mind goes into overdrive. Oh, my goodness, is he going to go to school and say, ‘Daddy yelled at me?’ So it makes me question is that thing I’ve done going to result in another care concern?

It would seem that Jim was hypervigilant about the potential for another care concern, so much so that he monitored all of his interactions with and between his children. While it might be a positive that foster carers are mindful about their actions, if this translates into carers worrying unnecessarily about things that occur in the normal course of parenting, then this would suggest undue impacts of the care concern process.

Sara also shared that after a care concern she was ‘paranoid’ about any bruises on her child:

When [child] got a bit older, I was paranoid about any marks on her. Because workers would comment on it, ‘She’s got this bruise on her arm. How did that get there?’ And she bumped into something, and I think that was – I got less of an issue as she got older and also as I became more her – recognised as her parent, because really once I was recognised as her parent, then I was seen as OK. But, yes, I think – I don’t know whether she was crawling or she was doing something, but she had caused an injury to herself. And [I] tried to explain this to a worker and I – see, having been through the previous care concern issues, I was very paranoid.

Importantly, even in the face of her own paranoia following the care concern experience, this was amplified when Sara was questioned by a statutory staff member. Again, while it is important that statutory workers are observant of children and potential harm to them, the experience of being questioned during a care concern process can leave foster carers feeling both hypervigilant when they are questioned subsequently and vulnerable to further accusations.

Discussion

The findings reported in this paper usefully extend previous literature on allegations of abuse in care as experienced by foster carers. Similar to the findings of Minty and Bray (2001), participants in the present study reported that while statutory staff made reference to natural justice, such justice was routinely denied to them. For many participants distress related to the care concern investigation process was compounded by the lack of information provided to them, as observed in previous studies (e.g., Roberts et al., 2024). The present study also identified additional areas of concern for foster carers subject to a care concern, namely the apparent dismissal of distress following a care concern investigation and changed ways of being following an investigation. These two topics are now each explored in turn.

In terms of lack of follow up, as noted in the results above, in one sense it is a positive that foster carers, following an investigation that does not result in the removal of children, are left to parent their children. Care concern investigations are an important part of keeping children safe, and once they have been undertaken, and if a carer is still deemed to be an appropriate parent to a child, it is important that they are left to do the work of parenting. Yet at the same time, for the participants in this study there was something of a disconnect: they were accused of abuse (and in some cases the abuse claim was substantiated) and yet were encouraged to carry on as though nothing had happened. This left many participants feeling that the care concern process was meaningless, and they were also left with considerable distress. Importantly, the point here is not that there should be some form of ‘punishment’ meted out to foster carers following a care concern. Rather, the question we would ask here is how might statutory responses to allegations be amended so that they cause less unnecessary distress to carers?

One option would be to consider the reframing of care concern investigations as conversations about caring for children. For example, if following an initial care concern it is likely that abuse did not occur, or was not intentional, rather than an ‘investigation’, statutory staff might undertake conversations with foster carers to explore their support needs. This would not be to sidestep actual abuse, nor to ignore the needs of children, but rather to move the focus away from ‘investigation’ (and subsequent distress) and towards a process that invites foster carers into productive and supportive relationships with statutory bodies. Rather than a punitive approach that, being non-judicial, produces an outcome that cannot be contested and may not result in any genuine or meaningful consequences, an invitation to a conversation may better serve to ensure the needs of both carers and children are met.

These suggestions about how care concerns are managed then speak to the second finding related to changed ways of being following a care concern investigation. Certainly, a productive conversation following a care concern may result in foster carers having greater insights about their actions. However, such insight is different to hypervigilance. Being aware of how one’s actions may be perceived, and how parenting children in care brings with it different expectations and oversight than parenting children one has birthed, offers different pathways to reflection than does a formal investigation process. The latter is likely to produce fear and thus hypervigilance, while conversations that encourage reflection are more likely to result in a genuine shift in how one thinks about one’s parenting. Fear may change behaviours simply by avoidance, whereas supportive reflection may help foster carers to think differently about what it means to parent. In this approach, the care concern investigation process would, in appropriate circumstances (i.e., depending on the nature of the care concern and the history of the foster carer), be an opportunity for growth that starts from a positive place of reflection, rather than resulting in potential post-traumatic growth that may be fear-driven.

Beyond these suggestions derived directly from the data, it is also important to consider other areas suggested by them. First is the need for better training for foster carers about the allegation process. In South Australia the peak body that supports carers provides such information (Connecting Foster and Kinship Carers, 2023). ¹ However, given not all carers are members of the peak body (though may of course access its information freely), it is important that the statutory and registering bodies also provide clear information about investigatory processes, both during initial training and as refreshers over the course of care provision. Similarly, while the central role of the peak body is to provide advocacy for carers, challenges in funding will always mean that there will be a shortfall in the capacity of the peak body to go beyond advocacy and to also provide counselling. The provision of funding specifically for counselling following an investigation is thus vital. Both information provision and counselling speak directly to foster care policy in South Australia. Greater transparency about allegation processes is needed, including the right to challenge the outcome of an investigation. While the statutory body plays a vital role in safeguarding children, this need not be accompanied by opaque or restrictive processes and policies that cause unnecessary distress to carers.

Limitations

While the sample reported in this paper was relatively diverse in terms of gender, sexuality, care experiences and age, it was relatively homogenous in terms of race. If a group of White foster carers experience care concern investigations in such relatively negative ways, we must wonder how other groups of people may experience investigations. It is also true that while the South Australian context is specific in terms of the care concerns process, it is important that future research also adopts a comparative approach to explore similarities and differences between investigations of allegations of abuse in care across Australian states and territories.

Conclusion

At present in South Australia, there is a strong push for legislative change that would allow foster carers to seek a review of a care concern determination. Such legislative change is vital, both to increase transparency in the care concern process and to reduce the unilateral control that statutory agencies have over a process that is non-judicial. In terms of the second theme in this paper, should this push for legislative change be successful, some of the concerns raised by participants may well be addressed. But what remains is the shock, the ‘back to normal’ approach following an investigation and the hypervigilance that can result. While legislative change is important, practice change is also necessary. As has been suggested, this may be achieved through triaging care concerns, so that in some cases conversations without a formal investigation may be a more appropriate response. There will always be a place for formal investigations in order to ensure the safety of children. But given that negative experiences with care concern processes have been identified as one reason people cease providing care (Roberts et al., 2024), it is important that, where possible, the shock, distress and hypervigilance experienced are reduced or removed entirely in favour of conversations that actually make a positive impact upon parenting practices.