In July 2025, South Australia’s Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence received a powerful jolt in the form of a report titled “Silence and Inaction: Children and young people’s experience of violence and systemic failure in South Australia.” Its findings are as heartbreaking as they are illuminating. The report urges whole-of-system reform so that children and young people are finally recognised, believed and supported as victim-survivors in their own right. It reveals a profound absence of youth-specific support services, and how adult-centric systems have rendered these kids virtually invisible — treated merely as appendages of their caregivers rather than individuals with their own rights, needs, and traumatic experiences.
This is a wake-up call: the way we’ve been responding (or failing to respond) to children’s suffering is not only inadequate, but also causing further harm.
Reading the report, it’s impossible not to be moved by the voices of the young people themselves. These are not “problem kids” — these are children in pain, many of whom have been hurt, belittled, imprisoned in their own homes and made to feel worthless, only to be ignored or disbelieved when they reached out for help. Dr. Fits-Gibbon’s report details a broad spectrum of violence young people endured — physical assaults like being “hit, slapped, pushed or beaten,” as well as relentless verbal and emotional abuse: threats, gaslighting, name-calling, and coercive control. These raw stories vividly convey the human toll of violence and neglect.
My own submission to the Royal Commission earlier in 2025 stressed that a great number of children in care and detention carry a history of trauma, frequently stemming from domestic or family violence — which has never been properly addressed. That trauma can manifest in understandable ways: anxiety, depression, anger, substance use, or even violent outbursts, as they try to cope with what’s happened to them. Instead of receiving therapeutic support, however, young people are too often met with punishment, dismissal or further abuse, feeding a cruel cycle. As my submission highlighted, unaddressed trauma and lack of support can exacerbate distress and behavioural challenges, sometimes pushing vulnerable kids into homelessness, re-victimisation, or the justice system — outcomes that a compassionate system would strive to prevent.
Crucially, I urged authorities to recognise violence in out-of-home care settings as a form of domestic and family violence, deserving the same attention and response as any abuse in a traditional family home. This includes violence between caregivers (foster or kinship carers, residential care staff) and children, or even between peers in a care setting. Silence and Inaction starkly reinforces this point. By giving young people in care a platform, it shows how some were hurt by the very people or systems meant to protect them, and how the system’s inaction or indifference compounded their trauma.
Both the report and my submission emphasised that children must be seen as victim-survivors in their own right, not merely footnotes in their parents’ stories. Children are telling us that they want to feel safe. They want to be believed. They want age-appropriate supports designed for them. And they want the surrounding systems to work for them, not against them. For example, youth-focused domestic violence services — refuges, counselling, legal help — since current services are almost exclusively adult-oriented. There are also gaps in mental health support and trauma-informed care for kids in state care or detention. We also need early intervention that identifies and responds to violence affecting children before it escalates to crisis.
The children and young people in these stories have done something incredibly brave: they broke the silence. They revisited their pain and trusted us with their truths in hopes that things will change. We cannot meet that bravery with inaction or more empty promises. It means reforming our child protection, out-of-home care and youth justice systems to be trauma-informed, child-friendly, and responsive. That would look like setting up accessible channels for them to speak, complain, and guide their own healing, whether through advocates like the Guardian, mentors, or youth advisory groups. We require concrete actions: funding dedicated support services for children escaping violence, training all carers, caseworkers, teachers, and officers to recognise and respond to signs of abuse and trauma, and ensuring that when a child says, “I’m hurt” or “I feel unsafe,” everyone responds with urgency and compassion. Ultimately, protecting these young lives must become our top priority — not in rhetoric, but in reality. Together, let’s demand a system that cherishes every child’s right to be safe, heard, and healed. It’s time to honour their courage with the reforms that will finally put children’s humanity at the centre.
