Beneath the ROSH

By Lisa MacLeod

In present-day Australia, like many other countries, children must be at risk of significant harm (ROSH) to get a response from child protection. If a child meets ROSH, they will get a protective response. If a child does not reach ROSH, they won’t.

Paige is a typical young girl living with her mother, father and younger sister, Lily. Together, she and her best friend Sam are about to start high school, make friends, learn about relationships and start their journey through adolescence.

Both girls’ lives are dramatically altered and their circumstances increasingly deteriorate. Yet they remain beneath the ROSH. Paige and Sam find that they are forced to rely on their own combined resources to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Jul 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463326886

Lisa MacLeod

Lisa MacLeod was born in Canada though has spent most of her life in Australia, where her family migrated in her early years. Since graduating, she has primarily worked in welfare in a variety of capacities, most recently with homeless and at-risk youth. She has written journal articles but this is her first novel.

Book preview

About the Author

Lisa MacLeod was born in Canada though has spent most of her life in Australia, where her family migrated in her early years. Since graduating, she has primarily worked in welfare in a variety of capacities, most recently with homeless and at-risk youth. She has written journal articles but this is her first novel.

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Dedications

For all the young people, some of whom I have had the pleasure to meet and those who I have not, who are trying to navigate the child protection and homelessness systems around the world. Your resilience, creativity and talents are inspirational.

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Beneath the Rosh

Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

Copyright 2018, Lisa MacLeod

The right of Lisa MacLeod Irving to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is

Available from the British Library.

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www.austinmacauley.com

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Beneath the Rosh, 2018

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

ISBN 978-1-78823-215-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-78823-216-6 (E-Book)

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First Published in 2018

Austin Macauley Publishers.LTD/

CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to all my family and my mentor for all your support.

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ROSH 101

I hurried into the humming classroom and headed for the nearest vacant seat in the rows of computers banked up on the long benches. Sitting down in one of several matching grey moulded plastic chairs, I pulled my spotless notebook and shiny pencil case out of my new backpack, neatly lined them up on the bench in front of me and settled the pack carefully by my feet on the floor. To my left were a couple of boys chatting together framing both sides of the bench, the one at the front straddling the back of his chair. I smiled at the girl sitting to my right with eyes framed by the largest green oval glasses I had ever seen and faced the front of the classroom. I felt like pinching myself. It was my very first university lecture, and I was sitting in Social Work 101. Instead, I opened my notebook then pencil case and removed a pen of each colour – blue, black and then red – and lined them up on the top of the first page. The classroom grew quieter as the lecturer walked into the room and plonked his leather briefcase on a table in front of a large screen. He looked like a mad young professor from a movie, with wiry ginger hair sticking up every which way and wearing a checked collared shirt over brown corduroy pants. His wire-rimmed eyes scanned the room waiting for total silence. Finally satisfied he moved over to a whiteboard to the left of the table and wrote his name, Mr Zimmer. The name suited him.

My name is Mr Zimmer, and I will be your lecturer for this subject. I expect you to attend all lectures, pay attention and complete all assignments and essays on time and to an excellent standard. Should you adhere to these expectations, you will almost certainly do well in this class. Having said that I am here to assist you with your studies, he said writing his office contact details on the board. He paused again facing the sea of expectant faces and waiting for everyone to finish writing the information down. Deciding everyone had had enough time he rubbed his details out and in big bold letters with an added flourish wrote ROSH on the whiteboard and asked the class if they knew what it meant. I saw the other students looking at each other to see if anyone could answer, shrugging and clueless but wanting to reply and make a good impression. None of them knew. Of course, I knew, but there was no way I was raising my hand for this question, not on my first day.

Risk of Significant Harm, commonly referred to as ROSH, is the reporting threshold for child protection concerns, continued the lecturer. He went on to explain how the child protection system was overwhelmed with kids reported at alarming rates. There was a lengthy inquiry into the problem; I wrote the statistics down in my notepad. The Inquiry estimated that thirty percent of reported children did not need the involvement of the Child Protection Agency, with only thirteen percent of those reported even getting to be seen by the Protection Agency. Mr Zimmer then explained how there was a need to reduce the strain, decrease the number of reports and ensure that kids who needed a legal intervention received one. He told the class how the inquiry found that other agencies, like health and education, should be sharing responsibility for child protection. How it was the responsibility of all adults to identify children who may be at risk of harm and do what they can to make sure they don’t get damaged. I heard him explain how it was decided to raise the reporting threshold from risk of harm to risk of significant harm, ROSH. For the Child Protection Agency to step in a child has to be assessed as at risk of significant harm. It is all about the significance and momentousness of the risk and the imminence of the potential damage. There is no need for the Child Protection Agency to be involved in the more trivial matters. Their job is to deal with urgent situations that could result in severe destruction. The solution was to raise the bar, up the stakes and make it harder to reach the grade. To the lecturer it was simple, fundamental economics. Where there is too much human want for scarce resources you either raise the price of the commodity or people’s ability to access it.

How do you know what is significant? asked the girl next to me with her hand raised.

That is an excellent question, answered the lecturer smiling encouragement.

Mr Zimmer continued to describe how the experts developed a tool, an on-line decision tool. The tool looks at the complexities and dynamics of each case. For example, their age. Age is important because they may be too little to run away. If they can run the risk is much lower, and their position may not be significant. The tool puts all the information together and comes up with the answer. If a case meets ROSH you make a report to the Child Protection Agency, if it doesn’t you deal with it, or get someone else to.

One of the other students wanted to know what happens if someone did not agree with the decision? What if, in their opinion, the child met ROSH but the tool said they didn’t? Mr Zimmer told the class that you could just make a report. There was no need to argue or complain if you didn’t agree, you could still make a report. In the end, it is the Child Protection Agency that decides if your situation meets ROSH and whether to take action or just file the information. They use their particular tool. That was news to me and my attention re-focused to Mr Zimmer.

To identify if a situation meets ROSH you use the Mandatory Reporters Guide (MRG). It is like an on-line step-by-step interview instrument. You select your most serious concern according to the classification of the type of abuse and the tool then asks you a series of questions that, when answered, results in a final decision report, he said. We are now going to use the MRG to decide if a case study meets ROSH, he continued and a scenario about a couch surfing young boy aged fifteen years flashed onto the big screen. He was homeless and staying with friend, after friend, after friend. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer we would get using the tool.

Turn on the computers in front of you and you can begin once you’ve read the case, said Zimmer and we started the exercise.

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Welcome to the Online Mandatory Reporter Guide (MRG/Tool)

Reporters are encouraged to use the MRG to determine whether or not to report to the Child Protection Agency under the risk of significant harm (ROSH) reporting threshold.

The interactive guide has been developed to assist front-line reporters such as police officers, teachers, nurses, social workers and non-government organisations (NGO) staff to determine whether a case meets the ROSH threshold.

The guide is based on research findings from the Structured Decision-making Model developed by the Children’s Research Centre. Structured decision-making tools have been implemented across the US, Canada, and Australia.

The MRG was developed through extensive consultation and detailed user testing.

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Agreed Policy Definition of Significant Harm

What is meant by ‘significant’ is that which is sufficiently serious to warrant a response by a statutory authority irrespective of a family’s consent.

What is significant is not minor or trivial, and may reasonably be expected to produce a substantial and demonstrably adverse impact on the child’s or young person’s safety, welfare or well-being.

If you become concerned that a child or young person known to you in your capacity as a mandatory reporter is being abused or neglected, or likely to be abused or neglected, this Mandatory Reporter Guide is a resource to help you make a decision about whether to report.

Select a Decision-tree

Lack of Physical Shelter/Environment

Question: Does child/young person or family have no safe place to stay (currently or in near future)?

OR

Question: Is there imminent danger of serious harm in the current residence?

Note answer NO if:

The child/young person or family is sharing a residence with others by mutual agreement and this arrangement is stable for the short term i.e. expected to last at least 10 days)

Answer: No

Question: Has the child/young person become significantly ill or injured from environmental conditions?

OR

Is the child/young person or family homeless, or in

temporary shelter that is not stable?

Answer: Yes

Homeless/Unstable

Question: Do you have any information that child/young person OR parent/carer refused or avoided the opportunity for assistance?

Answer: No

Question: Are you aware that child/young person/family is benefitting from services to address?

Note: answer YES if:

You or another person have already had a conversation with child/young person about your concerns and have provided resources and information, or they have sought services on their own.

AND

Child/young person has agreed to services

Answer: Yes/Homeless Hub

Decision

Document and continue the relationship.

Do not report to Child Protection. Document the decision and continue your professional relationship.

Document

Based on your agency’s policies document your concerns. Print and file the decision report issued after completion of the MRG.

Continue Relationship

If your professional role includes an on-going relationship with the child/young person and/or parent/carer, it is expected such a relationship will continue regardless of the reporting decision.

If your professional role does not include an on-going relationship with the child/young person and/or parent/carer, you are not required to maintain contact.

My original guess had been correct: the boy in the case study was beneath the ROSH. The exercise must be what Ms Anton-Hill and the others had been doing in front of their computer screens. They were checking if we met ROSH. The exercise reminded me of Sam, and made me wonder again, as I did most days, what had happened to her. Where was she now? And Lily, sweet little Lily, where was she?

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Seven Years Earlier

Chapter 1

Sunday’s Child

We used to go on holidays, Mum, Stuart, Lily and me. We left in the main school holidays, just after Christmas. We usually went to a seaside spot, like lots of families in Australia, but we never went to the same place twice. A few of my friends’ parents went to the same holiday spot year in and year out. We didn’t, we always went somewhere new and different. Places with names like The Entrance, Bateman’s Bay, Maroochydore and Cairns.

I remember the family’s very last holiday. It was the one just before I started high school. We stayed right across the road from the beach in the township of Vincentia, on the South Coast in a cottage owned by someone Stuart knew. I remember one day in particular.

Mum was struggling with a wiggling Lily, her striking structured face contorting as she tried to submit her to the slip slop slap of applying sunscreen.

Lily sit still, you can’t go to the beach until you protect your skin. Lily continued and Mum, finally giving up, or satisfied with the coverage, released her handing me the sunscreen. Away from Mum’s view, I applied the cream only to my face, across the nose and cheeks. I didn’t want to block out the sun, I wanted a tan. Bundling the prepared necessary supplies, I took the now quiet Lily by the hand and out the door. She started singing, To the beach, to the beach, to the beach.

It was a sparsely clouded morning, and the sun peeped through the gaps created by the light rolling winds. On the first contact with the soft, warm sand, Lily started marching with elaborate footsteps ensuring her full foot was submerged. The blue-white topped waves lapped the shore with little sound, leaving dark patches in the sand. On the wave’s departure, Lily raced into the water then ran back to shore retreating from the advancing waves, changing tactics and direction now and then to chase seagulls. We advanced up the beach in this way until we reached the lifesavers’ flags, unrolled the towels and sorted the packed necessities in a neat row, blue plastic bucket, yellow and red shovels and cookie cutters. Back and forth to the water we filled the bucket with wet sand and precisely began to construct a tower, then a whole castle. Anyone watching would have seen a skinny near-teenager, with a long thick curly mop of dark hair and slightly olive skin, bronzing nicely in the sun, with a darker skinned small chubby pre-schooler with shoulder length dark somewhat wavy hair reddened slightly by the sun. They may have thought we were babysitter and charge rather than sisters because Lily and I had different fathers and we didn’t look the same. I was a lot older than Lily too. I was nine years old already before Lily was even born.

Satisfied with our castle building efforts we jumped on top of it, kicking about until it again reduced to sand. We packed up our equipment and splashed around in the water and the waves in between the flags.

We’ll have to go back for lunch soon, I said glancing at my watch. Let’s look around the rock pools on the way. Lily jumped up and down in affirmation, and we slowly made our way back to the cottage along the rock pools. All we saw that day were little fish zig-zagging about busily and tiny crabs moving sideways. Once we had seen bluebottle jellyfish, luminous pouches floating with bright blue tendrils trailing peacefully behind in the still pools.

How was the beach? Mum yelled from the kitchen distributing salad onto plates. She often spoke loud and fast because her parents were from Spain. Stuart called her ‘my gipsy’. I don’t think gipsies were Spanish, but Mum was pleased with the tag.

We made a sand house and jumped on it, Lily piped while rubbing sand from her feet onto the tiles.

It was good, I added. I’m getting a nice tan. Mum finished with the plates asking us to sit at the table while taking one plate out to Stuart sitting in the lounge room in front of the TV with a stubby in hand and the football turned on. We usually all ate together, except when football was on. Stuart wouldn’t let anything interrupt a football match, other sports weren’t that important to him, but football sure was. The rest of us ate at the table that lunch.

Munching on salad as Lily chattered away to Mum in the background, I could see Stuart fixated on the TV and eating by remote control. Half aboriginal, he was a tall darkish bulky man without excess fat, more muscle. He had large soft kind brown eyes that seemed to sum up his very personality. Lily took mainly after him. I never knew my father; it was just Mum and me before Stuart. I don’t remember very much at all before Stuart, but I think Mum was kind of sad. Then when Stuart came to live with us, it was all sunny. Stuart was my father for a few years before Lily came along and then we shared him, but I was introduced to him the first time as Stuart, and that was the tag that stuck.

Yes! Stuart yelled out punching the air. He often did that when his team scored.

Paige, can you do the dishes while I give Lily a bath and try to get her down for a nap? Mum asked.

Okay, Mum. Can do, I said. Afterwards, I might go back to the beach, lie down with my book and work on my tan.

You need to keep up the sunscreen, it’s that time of day that the sun can do the most damage, Mum lectured, shaking her finger at me for good measure while dragging Lily towards the bath.

The man was positioned half under a bush with a red towel draped over his head and a khaki backpack tucked under it. He was sleeping out of the heat of the sun I guessed – homeless. If I continued on my path, I would have to walk right by him. I completed a quick detour around the spot, my heart picking up its beat to a faster pace as I moved forward. I didn’t want him waking up. You just never knew with homeless people, that’s what my Mum always said. There were good reasons why they were homeless; drugs and alcohol; couldn’t hold a job; lots of reasons, none of them good. I rapidly walked, beside the water instead of the dunes.

Checking the contrast of the white spot under my bikini to my darkening tan, I decided I’d spent enough time in the sun for the day. I’d get in trouble with Mum if there were any suggestion of red skin. I packed up my things and began my return trip home. The homeless man was still there unmoved. Oh no! I thought, remembering a story I had heard, or maybe read. A tourist, unfamiliar with the area found that the constant presence of a homeless person provided him with a feature to take stock of and confirm where he was. He’d used him as a sign post for about a week. One day the tourist noticed that the homeless man was gone. He read in the paper that he had been found to be dead. Everyone had just walked past a dead man for days on end. Maybe just like this one, I abruptly thought. What if the man with the towel around his head was dead, or even hurt? I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just leave him hurt and dying. I thought about getting Stuart and bringing him back to check up on the man. There was something wrong with him I was convinced. Then I heard him moan. I completed a quick look around but saw no one else nearby. Another moan impelled me to action, and I walked briskly up to the man. I couldn’t stop to think about what I was doing; the man seemed hurt, and I was the only one here. My heart was hammering in my ears.

Are you alright sir? I asked loudly. Thinking it was best to be extra polite just in case, in the case of what I didn’t want to think. Can I do anything to help?

The man jerked and opened his eyes. His eyes were almost the same colour as the red towel around his head. I now was sure he was injured, blood pooling in the corners of each eye, the towel no doubt covering further damage. He looked at me groggily for a nanosecond.

Piss off princess, erupted from his mouth deafeningly. What’s a person got to do just to be left alone to sleep? and a stream of rude language, that I can’t repeat, followed with increasing menace. Then he started moving.

Sorry, I stammered, turning and running as fast as I could in the direction of home, my heart hammering my legs home. Mum was right; there are good reasons why they’re homeless and none good. I promised myself to be sure to remember that encounter, forever etched in my brain, a reminder to never mess with homeless people. I arrived home out of breath and crashed into the lounge room, surprising Mum and Stuart. Collapsing into a chair I tried to catch my breath.

Whatever is the matter, Paige? asked Mum.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost, added Stuart. You look as if you’ve run from the Surf Club all the way to the cottage. I sat up and swung my legs over to a sitting position facing the both of them and began my tale.

There was a homeless man on the beach sleeping under a bush. Except I didn’t know if he was asleep or… Unbelievably Mum turned the tables somehow so it was unexpectedly my fault.

Paige, that was just stupid, screamed Mum. Whatever were you thinking? You could have been hurt, or worse.

What did you think would happen? said Stuart shaking his head. How would you feel if someone woke you up when you slept?

But he could have been hurt or dying, I explained. It wouldn’t be fair or right if everyone just walked past and didn’t check everything was alright, would it? If he had needed help or even an ambulance, you’d think I was a hero! What else could I have done, there was no one else around. It was up to me, I said in frustration and near to tears with the unfairness of it.

Okay, okay, Stuart intervened holding up his hands in a truce. "Paige, you just need to realise, you can’t save the world. Some things are the way they are, and nothing you do will change it. It wasn’t the brightest thing to do, but we understand that you may have