Ruah’s innovative Care and Protection Service has received an overwhelmingly positive response from the vulnerable families it has supported in its first year. Launched in September 2020, the Care and Protection Service was the first program of its kind in WA to provide wrap-around legal and social support and advocacy to families facing child protection proceedings.
We know that families involved with child protection proceedings are often experiencing multiple, co-occuring non-legal issues with the most common factors associated with the removal of children being family violence, parental substance abuse, and parental mental illness.
The need for quality, holistic support for these families is great. Our Care and Protection service brings together a lawyer and a community case worker in a team to provide wrap-around support to a client throughout their proceedings. The service adopts an early intervention approach providing intense advocacy in the early stages of Care and Protection proceedings, and then ongoing support right up until the end of their matter.