It’s a scary thought, and if you’ve had this thought, you’re not alone. Without exaggeration, I am asked a variation of this question in every single training session I deliver. If you let your mind wander with that worry, it only takes a moment before you start to imagine some very serious consequences. We won’t go into that here, because it is not the point of this article to cause fear.

The first point to make about this is a simple one: you won’t be punished for making a mistake. The child protection legislation in your state/territory will have statements about ‘acting honestly and reasonably’ and ‘in good faith’ and providing information which you, ‘believe to be true’ or ‘believe to be correct.’ It is a crime to knowingly make false or malicious reports, but it is not a crime to believe you are doing the right thing, to act in good faith and to later become aware that you had made a mistake.

The second point to make about this is also very simple: the child protection agency won’t remove a child from their family home because of what you said in a report. Information reported to child protection agencies is regarded as “suspicions” or “allegations” and no assessment is made about their validity when they’re received – the assessment is about their serious and the risk of harm to the child. This means that when you make a report, no matter what you say, all you are doing is providing the child protection agency with an opportunity to determine if they need to speak with that family or not. Anything that happens after that is a result of what they found when they had contact with that family.

To be clear – any decision made by the child protection agency about needing to remove a child from the family home is based entirely on what those officers found as part of their investigation. The reason they decided to remove might have nothing to do with the information you provided and be about something else they uncovered in their investigation. It could be that everything you said was 100 per cent true and their assessment was that the only way to ensure the child’s safety was to remove the child. Whatever the situation, it must be very serious for them to remove the child and they will eventually need to justify their actions and decisions in court.

The final point I want to make on this question is the most important and basically makes the other two meaningless and this is how I answer the question when I am asked during training…