Australian indigenous children more likely to receive protection services

Indigenous children in Australia are seven times more likely to be receiving child protection services, according to new data released on Friday.

The report on child protection in Australia by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) showed 28 per cent of children who received child protection services in the year to June 2014 were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, despite Indigenous Australians making up a fraction of the general population.

Child protection services were defined as child protection investigations, a care and protection order or in out-of-home care with almost one in seven Indigenous children receiving at least one of these during the reporting period.

This compared to less than one in 50 non-Indigenous children.

The AIHW report showed of the 143,023 children receiving child protection services in the year to June 2014, almost 60 percent were the subject of an abuse investigation. 38.5 percent of children were on a care and protection order, while around 36.4 percent were in out-of-home care during the year.

Eight percent of children were subject of all three care services.

"Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of all children involved in the child protection system were repeat clients in 2013-14," said AIHW spokesperson Justine Boland. "That is, they had also received child protection services in a previous financial year."

For 39 percent of the 99,000 investigations, the alleged abuse was deemed likely or certain to have happened, with 20 percent of those the subject of multiple substantiations during the year.

Emotional abuse was the most common primary type of substantiated abuse (40 percent), followed by neglect (28 percent). This was followed by physical abuse (19 percent) and sexual abuse (14 percent).