Know Your Rights – how to navigate the child protection system

AbSec – the NSW Child, Family and Community Peak Aboriginal Corporation – has launched ‘Know Your Rights’, a groundbreaking online resource built by and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families navigating the NSW child protection system.

The Know Your Rights website provides practical guidance, stories guided by lived experience, and resources to help parents be informed, confident, and empowered. The website includes information guides, videos and animations to equip families at critical moments – when a child could be removed, when a child has been removed, and key contacts families need.

It provides step-by-step explanations of each stage in the child protection process, options for what families can do at each step, voices and experiences of other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents, and journals for creating evidence through documentation.

AbSec CEO John Leha said Know Your Rights responds directly to what families have been telling us for years.

“Time and again, our families report being denied information about their rights and told they’re powerless within the system,”he said.

Know Your Rights changes that by empowering families with the knowledge, tools, and community voices they need to engage with a system that has disempowered them for too long.”

Need for accessible information

Research has revealed a stark reality: over the past decade, Aboriginal children placed in out-of-home care has increased 48 per cent in NSW, with less than half returning to their parents.

The NSW reunification rate is the lowest of any State or Territory in Australia. Despite the NSW Department of Communities and Justice stating that restoration is a priority, Aboriginal families experience a different reality. Once children are on final care orders, restoration is highly unlikely, particularly for children who enter care under two years of age.

Know Your Rights is grounded in the Bring Them Home, Keep Them Home research led by UNSW’s Social Policy Research Centre – the first Aboriginal-led research into the reunification of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

Created directly from the voices and experiences of Aboriginal parents and families who have navigated the child protection system, this resource embodies genuine community co-design and self-determination.

Lead researcher, Associate Professor BJ Newton said the research revealed the urgent need for families to have accessible information about their rights.

“In Australia, Aboriginal children are 10 times more likely to be removed than other children,” Ms Newton sad.

The system targets Aboriginal families, and once children enter care it is very difficult to get them back home.

“Through the research we know there are many children in care that should not have been removed, and there are many families desperately trying to get their children home.

“Know Your Rights arms Aboriginal families and their supporters with the knowledge needed to navigate and the child protection system. It is one way to shift the power imbalance between child protection systems and Aboriginal families and communities”.

Associate Prof Newton said “advocating for Aboriginal rights and justice through research that genuinely serves communities has been at the heart of my work and Know Your Rights represents what’s possible when research is led by and with Aboriginal families.

Making a difference

Parents who participated in the research shared powerful truths about their experiences.

One parent said: “They make you believe that they can do whatever they want, and you’ve got no rights. I still to this day don’t even know my rights. No one actually has ever told me what my rights were.”

Another parent’s words reflected the resilience at the heart of this resource.

“Stand up for yourself, you’re allowed to push for what you want… you really have to speak up even if you don’t get anywhere at least you’ve pushed for it.”

Another mother reflected on how Know Your Rights would have made a difference during her experience with the NSW child protection system.

“I had no idea the rights I had, but I do now, and I really hope that Know Your Rights will make a difference to other families,” she said.

“If I had something like Know Your Rights available for me back then, maybe, just maybe, my girls could have had more of their childhood protected from the system, they could have been raised together, and they would both carry less emotional scars from the many years that were taken from them.

“My girls had the right to be raised together, and we had the right to be supported to be safe together.”

Visit www.kyr.org.au to access the information guides and stay connected with project updates.