Recent studies have shown that issues of poverty and neglect within families receive little attention from health boards, which tend to concentrate on abuse, especially child sexual abuse, a conference on child poverty has been told.
Dr Helen Buckley, lecturer in social work in Trinity College Dublin, told a European Anti-Poverty Network conference in Dublin that studies in which she had been involved showed that good family support services appeared to be rationed to cases where serious harm had already been done to children.
It was likely that poverty and deprivation, as well as emotional stress, loneliness and low esteem generally, had a negative effect on child care, according to Dr Buckley. "Child protection procedures and policies tend to locate the causes of child neglect in a more individualistic way and shape their interventions similarly," she said.
"The net result of this is that the child protection system often has little to offer families whose main child care problems are strongly associated with poverty, deprivation and marginalisation.
"For example, the debate about mandatory reporting, paedophile registers and so on may be significant, but it applies to only a fraction of the sort of cases which come into contact with the system, and gives an artificial impression that problems around child protection and child welfare are genuinely being tackled."
She referred to two studies, one in the South-Eastern Health Board by her and two colleagues, the other by her in the Eastern Health Board, which examined the response of the system to concerns about child care.
"The cases which were likely to be taken on for longer-term work were those where a recognisable `norm' of abuse was clearly visible. Even within this category, `neglect' cases were the category which were more likely to filtered out of the system, with no services offered."
In the EHB there was evidence of an even more serious trend. Her study showed a "bias" against dealing with problems of poverty and deprivation. "It showed that families . . . who had a history of insidious problems of a socio-economic nature were far less likely to receive services than those where the referrals concerned individual incidents of sexual or physical abuse."
The reports showed, she said, "that problems of an economic nature were of little interest to child protection practitioners".
She urged a refocusing on supporting rather than punishing families, with more support services, but warned that this might be difficult to achieve in a context "which is increasingly driven by the sort of defensive practice that has recently evolved".
Mr Brian Kenny, representing Barnardo's, said that while recently there had been a welcome increase in activity in the areas of child poverty and deprivation, there was a need for an overall strategy to meet all the needs.
He drew the attention of the conference to recent documents aimed at tackling these problems - the Children's Bill (1998), the Joint Programme for Government, the National Anti-Poverty Strategy, the Combat Poverty Agency strategic plan, two reports from the Ministerial Task Force on Drugs, the 1991 Child Care Act, the White Paper on Education, the Report of the Commission on the Family and the Partnership 2000 agreement.
Many of these were looking at different aspects of the same problem, he said, and everything needed to be knitted together into a coherent overall policy.