Recognising the potential in traumatised young people
Child welfare
Andrew Lowth, Principal Practitioner at Berry Street, has an amazing capacity to find the glimmer of hope in seemingly hopeless situations. And that means that some of the most vulnerable young people in Victoria, who have experienced unimaginable trauma, receive the intensive, relentless support they need to get them through and out the other side with a sense of purpose and pride.
We work with human beings who are traumatised. We work with young people who've had really significant difficulties early in life. We work with parents who've struggled intergenerationally with a whole range of challenges. And so I guess my role is to help our teams right across the organisation, manage the unmanageable.
Like an 11 year-old young person who was removed from his parents’ care when he was eight because of their significant drug use. His parents were using methamphetamine and Child Protection had worked really hard to try and get them into detox and to change their behaviour.
In the meantime, this young boy was placed in residential care with 3 other young people.
Residential care can conjure up many images for people across the community but as Interim CEO Jenny MacNaughton says,
“A residential care home just looks like a home anywhere around your suburb. But people often think it's a big house, like Annie, with bars and things like that”.
But despite the supportive environment in a house that looks like any other, once there, things didn’t get any easier. He wasn't going to school. He was struggling emotionally. He was really angry with his mum and wondering why he couldn’t go home.
As Andrew shared, “He had almost what I would describe as given up”, and the team working with him were at their wit’s end too. They really loved this young person but had tried everything and didn’t know how to help.
That’s where Andrew stepped in.
He could see how much potential the young person had and started tackling the problem from a different angle. This young person missed his mum so much so how could she be more involved?
“We put in a lot of work. Our team did an amazing job with that mum, so we got permission from Child Protection to work closely with her around is there any possibility that he can come home? What would it take to bring him home? So we did get him home...”
Find out more from Jenny and Andrew about how the child protection system works and the way Berry Street is striving to help young people who need it most on in the first episode from our Stories from Berry Street podcast.
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