PARENTS DENIED RIGHT TO FOSTER FOR SMACKING CHILDREN

April 2010

APN Newsletter

A couple with 11 children have been told by the Department for Child Protection in Western Australia that they cannot become foster parents because they sometimes physically discipline their children. John and Pat Wieske say the family see fostering as their Christian duty and a chance to give something back to the community but during interviews with the department they revealed that they occasionally smacked their children and the department consequently deemed them unsuitable to be foster parents.

Child Protection Minister Robyn McSweeney has backed her department's decision. She conceded that she had also used physical discipline on her own children. Mr Wieske, a builder, said he and his wife guaranteed the department that they would not smack a foster child but had been told that children in State care could not live in a home where the natural children of the parents were being physically disciplined. The Wieske children, five boys and six girls ranging in age from six to 20, all still live at home, but Mr Wieske said there was room at their property for more.

"If we can make a difference in one child's life it's worth it," Mr Wieske said. But the Department for Child Protection decided it did not want the Wieskes' help despite a constant demand for foster parents. There are 3238 children currently on the department's books, many of them in emergency care looking for a permanent home. Mr Wieske said the couple had been trying to become foster parents for four years but had been given numerous excuses by the department about why they could not join the program, including that they already had too many children.

"I gave them a 10-page letter arguing that big families were a positive, not a negative, thing, which they accepted," Mr Wieske said. "In the end it came down to the fact that because we choose to implement our legal right to train our children, with physical chastisement being a very small part of that, we were not acceptable." Ms McSweeney said foster children came from traumatic and abusive backgrounds and she had drawn a line in the sand on the kind of homes they could go to.

"I don't want them in anyone's home who physically punishes their own children, albeit in another room. I don't want them put under that much stress," she said. Ms McSweeney rejected the notion that, because she smacked her own children while they were growing up, under her own rules she would be barred from becoming a foster parent. "I wouldn't disqualify myself," she said. "I don't have children (at home) any more, so I can become a foster parent. "I'm not talking about biological kids, that's a whole different ball game."

But Liberal backbencher Peter Abetz, who brought the Wieske case to the attention of State Parliament, said the decision was political correctness gone mad. "It's ideologically driven," he said. "You mustn't ever, ever smack your child because it might be psychologically scarred for life kind of nonsense and I think we've seen the consequences of that kind of parenting in our society," he said. Mr Abetz said the department's ruling was an overreaction to recent revelations about the abuse of children in State care in the past.