Child abuse reporting system under fire again
FIRST ON 7: Families SA’s child abuse reporting systems are under fire again after its online service crashed.
One furious father said he also tried the hotline, but his calls went unanswered.
He fears his eight-year-old daughter, who lives with her mother, is being neglected, so he called the child abuse hotline on Friday.
After waiting for 30 minutes, he gave up.
A pre-recorded message directed him to the online protection reporting system, but that did not get him anywhere either.
“A page that’s thinking about trying to connect somewhere and eventually saying it’s unavailable,” the father told 7News.
His sister managed to lodge a report before the website crashed, but he wanted to lodge his own.
“We decided it was probably best that we all sort of rallied together and put as many reports through as we could to sort of try and get this heard,” the girl’s aunt told 7News.
But Families SA says reporting the same information multiple times makes more work for its staff and reduced the amount of time they can spend investigating.
An hour after 7News contacted Families SA today, the website was fixed.
A call-back service that was meant to be introduced a year ago still does not exist.
