A report to be issued today will point to a disturbing increase in the number of children engaging in self-harm when their parents separate. It will call on the Federal Government to establish a families commission to strengthen family relationships and help reduce conflict between separated parents. The report will include previously unpublished data showing a 66per cent rise over 10 years in hospitalisations due to self-harm among children aged 12 to 14 years.
The rate of self-harm has risen by 90per cent for teenage girls, the report says. The report was commissioned by the Australian Christian Lobby and written by Professor Patrick Parkinson, of the law school at the University of Sydney.
At the launch of the report at Parliament House as part of National Child Protection Week, Professor Parkinson will criticise the narrow focus by policy makers on social problems resulting from family breakdown.
''Governments, perhaps the community at large, tend to see social problems as being like spot fires, rarely do we see the spot fires as a symptom rather than an isolated problem to be addressed, rarely do we recognise the possibility that behind the visible spot fires, a major bushfire is burning,'' he says.
''The evidence from international trends, including that from America and Europe referred to in this report, is that there is now a major 'bushfire' burning across the Western world. Australia is not an exception to this trend.''
Professor Parkinson will highlight the adverse impacts on Australian children of the rapid changes in family structure, including the rise in parental separation due to divorce and the breakdown of co-habiting relationships.
''There is a wealth of data about children's wellbeing at a given moment in time,'' he says. ''What this research has done is to examine the trends over a period of time, and many of those trends, in terms of our most vulnerable children and young people, are alarming.''He says the number of children who do not reach the age of 15 in an intact family with both of their biological parents has almost doubled within a generation.
''While not all problems faced by Australia's children today can, by any means, be attributed to the consequences of unstable and conflictual family relationships, the fragility of Australian families over recent generations has been a major contributing factor,'' he says. ''The deteriorating mental and emotional wellbeing of each generation has an impact on the next, creating a cascading effect. ''The accumulated evidence I present in this report convinces me that the need for new initiatives is both urgent and compelling.''