Meg Benson is a professional therapist whose work has become a 24/7 job.
She has opened her home to a child who had previously struggled in foster care and government-run residential care.
"Definitely it's a challenge but I knew that, so I had in mind the long game the whole way," Ms Benson said.
She is part of a new model of out-of-home care helping a small number of children in New South Wales.
It is based on a German concept and involves a professional social worker, counsellor, or therapist who is paid a full-time wage to care for a child in their own home.
The carers use their professional skills to manage the child's trauma and build relationships.
Ms Benson said within a couple of years the outcomes for the child she cared for had been "phenomenal"
She said after a couple of months he had "gone from minimal attendance" at school with "lots of suspensions" to "100 per cent attendance at school".
"He's jumped up a couple of years of education in each school year to begin to catch up."
Ms Benson said she worked to maintain a connection with the child's birth parents.
"I want to see the child happy and not heartbroken, and that means we've increased some phone calls, we've increased some visits."
Ms Benson said the benefits of building a relationship with the child in her care were clear.
As for the around-the-clock nature of the job, Ms Benson said while she was effectively donating her time outside her 40-hour work week, there were opportunities for downtime.
"If your child does have great school engagement then you've got time to sit and have interviews with the ABC," she said.
Access to 'real relationships'
Jarrod Wheatley is the chief executive of Professional Individualised Care, which he describes as the "final stop in out-of-home care" when all else has failed.
The program has been running for the past five years and works with children who have been in multiple foster homes, group home placements, or even living in hotels where they were supervised by shift workers.
"What this means for the child is they actually have access to real relationships and connections, not eight-hour shift-workers," Mr Wheatley said.
"They have that with someone who has the professional skill-set to appropriately respond to complex trauma and the attachment needs of the child.
"Kids can do something pretty incredible, which is to rewire their brain and trust in relationships again."
Mr Wheatley said the model could only cater for a small percentage of children in out-of-home care.
But he said there were lessons to be learned from the model for all stages of child protection intervention.
"The problem is the vast majority of our interventions currently are spending 90 per cent of their time on paperwork, 90 per cent of their time on the system's needs, but not actually investing in those real connections with children.
"But policies and procedures don't meet people's needs — it's people that do.
"It's certainly possible for us to run relationship-based models in the early intervention and family preservation space."
Helping parents when their kids are removed
At the time when Grace's* child was removed by Child Safety officers, she was struggling.
Grace also found dealing with child protection workers extremely difficult.
"I couldn't talk to them … basically they were going against me," she said.
She credits the support of the Salvation Army's Doorway to Parenting program as being key to gaining greater access to her child, who remains in kinship care.
"I can basically see my child whenever I please; they have a lot of faith in me now.
"I have been drug-free for two years, don't smoke anymore … I've got my own car, I'm working."
Grace worked directly with Salvation Army case worker Erica Heffernan.
"The families that come through are at the most vulnerable stage of their life," Ms Heffernan said.
"They're at risk of either getting their children removed or they've had their child removed and put into kinship or foster care placement."
She said the aim of the program was to build an attachment between parents and their children and to reunify families where possible.
That means supervised visits in a home-like environment and parenting classes.
To help with reunification, parenting programs are offered along with other supports.
"A referral for drug and alcohol [for example] or support letters for housing, addressing their mental health, going to a psychologist appointment with them," Ms Heffernan said.
"The other aim is to work to help parents work alongside child safety officers.
"We find that parents have been through so much trauma that [there's] so much emotion behind meeting with child safety officers.
"To have someone speak on their behalf or support them through what they want to say … helps them further in their case."
The program successfully reunified 11 families in Tasmania between 2017 and 2019.
But with a limited number of case workers, there is a waiting list of people wanting to access the program.
"We do work with families long-term, we know this is not a quick fix," Ms Heffernan said.
Child protection is 'in crisis globally', but there are examples of good practice
An ABC investigation prompted 700 people to come forward with serious concerns about child protection systems across the country.
The investigation heard stories of rape, abuse, neglect and racism within the system, which the National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, has described as "broken".
Professor Leah Bromfield, director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia, said Australia was not alone.
"I really wish I could tell you there was one country where child protection was done brilliantly that we could just copy, but unfortunately, child protection is in crisis globally," Dr Bromfield said.
"There are things that we are doing well in kind of slices of the system."
An example is the Murri school in Queensland, which "has said a lot of our kids have got trauma", Dr Bromfield said.
"So [it has] trauma-informed classrooms, having extra things like allied health professionals on the campus providing services to the kids.
"All of these things are really designed to say … we're going to set this system up to give these kids the best chance for success."
System designed around 'outdated assumptions'
Dr Bromfield said Australian and overseas child protection models were seeking to intervene early.
But she said the systems were designed around outdated assumptions.
"We are seeing some serious complex needs of active mental illness, active substance addiction and unmanaged domestic and family violence, homelessness and housing instability," she said.
"That means that early intervention actually needs to be designed around families with multiple and complex needs."
Dr Bromfield said Australia could look to places like Canada for models in how to transfer statutory responsibility to Aboriginal and community-controlled organisations "who we recognise are best placed to respond to their kids."
Barbara Fallon, from the University of Toronto's Social Work faculty, said First Nations sovereignty around data and services was imperative, but First Nations children continued to be over-represented in Canada's child welfare system.
"First Nations children were 17 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home formal care at the conclusion of an investigation than a non-Indigenous child," she said.
Australia's National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, said there had been more than 2,000 recommendations from various inquiries into child protection in Australia.
She said the recommendations needed to be implemented and national leadership was also needed.
Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has met with Ms Hollonds to discuss the "horrific" cases of abuse in care that have come to light as a result of the ABC investigation.
Mr Dreyfus said he was giving careful consideration to the points raised in the briefings.
"No child should experience abuse or neglect, especially in the child protection system," Mr Dreyfus said.
*Name has been changed.
