time of between 3 and 7 days. This lead to cases with medium and low risk to children not getting attention within the time frame it should and therefore a “backlog” gets created in the Intake Team. Investigations Team The Investigations Team is responsible for the statutory intervention in respect of children in need of care and protection. They receive referrals either from the Intake or Intervention Team after the child concerned was placed in temporary safe care or directly from the Children’s Court in the form of an Order to Investigate. Orders to investigate are issued by the court after allegations of child maltreatment was reported directly to the Children’s Court. On average the workers have 25 active children’s court inquiries at any given time. They attend between 3 and 5 court hearings per week and at the same time have to do investigations for their cases, apply for birth certificates, trace parents, etc. This put an enormous amount of pressure on the workers and at times lead to court hearings having to be postponed as
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they just did not have the time to finalise their investigations. Intervention Team: The Intervention team is responsible for the monitoring and support services to families in respect of children not removed or children returned to the care of parents under conditions as well as mediation services in respect of parenting plans and contact & care. The Children’s Court issue orders to either investigate parties’ circumstances or to mediate between parties in order for the court to make a decision in respect of a parenting plan or a contact & care order. It is evident over the last few years that services around parenting plans and contact & care orders are very demanding in respect of time and resources as well as very stressful for workers as they also need to deal with the history of conflict between the parties. This service therefore lead to the workers not being able to give as much attention to the monitoring and support cases.
Annual Report 2015