KIESHA WEIPPEART - WE’RE ALL TO BLAME FOR KIESHA Kiesha Weippeart’s little body bore the marks of a lifetime of abuse, fractures partially healed in her nose, her jaw, her skull. Her upper arm showed trauma consistent with twisting. These were injuries at the hands of her mother that received no medical attention, despite the fact police, social workers, neighbours, relatives, education and health authorities had all seen the telltale signs of abuse. The pretty six-year-old girl with the blue eyes and tight smile might have melted Sydney’s heart after death, but in life no one cared. Kristi Abrahams, 30, was sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court last week to at least 16 years in jail for the bashing murder of Kiesha. She delivered the fatal blow but the collective guilt of the community could be heard in the anger of the baying mob outside the court. The final time Kristi bashed Kiesha in 2010, she used such force she broke her teeth, striking her face, the forensic pathologist told the court, as many as five-times. Kiesha had gone to school just four days that year but enough for a teacher to notice bruises on her forehead. Truant officers were on her mother’s tail, visiting seven times between February and July, but always finding a locked door. You’d think after the third time, they might have called police to find out what Kristi was hiding: a child covered with bruises and cigarette burns. When Kiesha was three, the late drug addict father she so resembled, Chris Weippeart, reported Kristi to police for biting his daughter on the shoulder. Then he left. “Mum did that,” Kiesha told police. “Mum” was charged with assault and received a 12-month good behaviour bond. Kiesha was fostered out for 18 happy months. Her mother often didn’t show up to access meetings. INexpliciably, in 2006, Kiesha was returned home, despite the strong recommendation of a caseworker that she stay with her foster family till she was 18. The court knew better. Kiesha was reuinited with her mother, who had a new boyfriend, the gormless Robert Smith, since jailed for burning Kiesha’s body to hide the evidence. Why was the caseworkers’ recommendation of permanent removal over-ruled by the court? The NSW Family and Community Services department responded to inquiries last week with motherhood statements, and children’s court decisions across the country are shrouded in secrecy, ostensibly for privacy reasons. But a police officer who has worke din child protection, and spent a lot of his working life in the Children’s Court at Parramatta, defends frontline caseworkers. He has never seen them make a decision lightly to remove a child from an abusive home but too often their recommendations are overhauled. Magistrates “don’t operate on community expectations. They are operating on pieces of paper, and the mother getting into court all clean and tidy in a suit”. Removals are “always vigorously defended”, and no one opposes removals more vigorously than the Aboriginal Legal Service. Of Kiesha, he says: “If she wasn’t Aboriginal I think she probably would have been removed” permanently from her mother. So was it the fact that Kristi was half-Aboriginal, and therefore her daughter classed as indigenous, that influenced the court’s decision to return the child to her mother, against the best advice? Another child sacrificed on the altar of the Stolen Generations? The court was complying with the Aboriginal Placement Principles of The Children and Young Persons Act which effectively requires welfare authorities in NSW to keep a child with its family or place the child with “culturally appropriate” carers, even though Aboriginal foster carers are thin on the ground. Similarly, in Victoria, “cultural safety” is the mantra. The National Framework for the Protection of Australia’s Children, instituted under the Rudd government in 2009, after the Prime Ministers’ apology to the Stolen Generations, has the same aims. We can blame the Bringing Them Home report of 1997, w hich set out to ensure there never would be another “stolen generation”, for hobbling state welfare services’ ability to care as well for indigenous children as they do for a while. This is despite the fact indigenous children are eight times more likely to be at risk of harm. The irony is that Kiesha’s mother rejected her own aboriginality because of the “extreme violence” she suffered as a child. When she was 11, after her mother died, welfare workers recommended Kristi be placed with a non-Aboriginal family “despite statutory provisions to the effect that Aboriginal children should be placed in aboriginal care. This was because the offender’s experiences with herAboriginal father caused her to reject her aboriginality,” said the sentencing judge. “Despite the recommendation, the offender was placed in an Aboriginal children’s group home – the emotional support (she) so greatly needed was not provided.” Kristi was growing up as the hysteria over stolen children was reaching a crescendo. She was put into care a year before the inquiry that would lead to the Bringing Them Home report with its urgings to keep Aborginal families intact at all costs. The consequences of her loveless childhood were disastrous. S he could not have been better set up to fail as a parent. By 2010 she was struck in a small dark flat in Mt Druitt with no family support. Most women would find such circumstances trying. Let alone someone with an IQ of 68 and a childhood of abuse. That is not to excuse her but to explain why the judge found Keisha’s death was “the foreseeable and preventable consequence of equally foreseeable and preventable causes”. Kristi Abrahams had been on the caseworkers’ books since she was a child. It should have been obvious she was a ticking timebomb, and a new baby would be the last straw. (Miranda Devine)
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 14:09:17 +0000