Usually in the 24/7 company of child safety workers, the Christmas party was Tayla’s chance to socialise with other state wards who lived in residential care homes.
Warning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse.
The event was held by CASPA — a taxpayer-funded organisation looking after at-risk children at the behest of the New South Wales government.
That’s where Tayla hit it off with two other teens, Kellie* and Max*.
Drawn together by their bubbly yet rebellious nature, the encounter about four years ago grew into a friendship with grave consequences.
“Kellie … actually, I hate her for this but I still love her as a friend, she had to pay off drug debts and she took us [Max and I] around to an older man’s house and left us there,” Tayla said.
“We got drugged and I was in and out of seizures.
“I was raped several, several times.
“I thought Max was dead. I could not find him anywhere.
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“And then I went into a room, and he was there.
“I remember just getting up and was running as fast as I could.
“Max followed not long behind, and we ran home.”
Back at the residential care home, Tayla asked one of the workers: “Is that rape if I can’t say yes or no?”
Max said he told staff at his CASPA house what had happened, and they reported it to the police.
Tayla developed an addiction to drugs, leading down the path of youth crime. (Supplied)
‘I would rather have been anywhere than there’
The department had put Tayla in residential care after her foster placement broke down.
But despite her high needs and multiple medical conditions, including foetal alcohol syndrome and autism spectrum disorder, she was not placed in an “intensive therapeutic care” home.
The intensive therapeutic care model was introduced in NSW in 2018, but the department said CASPA started delivering it in 2024.
Tayla alleged there was a lack of engagement and guidance from residential care staff who sat “in the office on their phone” while she smoked “cigarettes and cones” in her room.
“I would rather have been anywhere than there, and I was getting myself into situations for being raped, situations for being taken advantage of, just so I wouldn’t be at these houses,” she said.
She developed a “full-blown” addiction to drugs, leading down the path of youth crime and subsequent juvenile detention.
“I was a troubled child and that’s what they should have seen. It wasn’t me. It was what I’d gone through that made me the way I was,” she said.
In one year, the NSW child protection department received more than 100 notifications about Tayla to the helpline, but fewer than 10 alternate assessments were completed.
According to the department, alternate assessment is used to assess the child’s immediate safety, and it must include direct interaction with the child.
Tayla is now 19 years old and out of the residential care system. (Supplied)
The NSW Ombudsman is currently investigating how the Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) manages reports, with a particular focus on those closed due to a lack of resources.
Children flagged with child protection services may be referred to other department units or service providers.
But in a report tabled last year, the ombudsman said it had for a decade raised concerns about “a significant gap in information” about what happens to those children.
It recommended that the department follow up with agencies.
“We are continuing to monitor DCJ’s implementation of this recommendation,” it told the ABC.
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Tayla ‘unable to identify red flags’
One of the people abusing Tayla was known to CASPA as a former residential care child. Tayla later had a domestic violence order against him.
Her safety plan from 2023 shows CASPA knew the girl was easily influenced by her peers, had been groomed online by older men, and used self-harm “as a way of expressing her pain”.
“Tayla will often spend time in unsafe locations and will seek the company of unsafe people. Tayla is unable to identify the red flags and alarm bells when in unsafe settings and misreads the intentions of peers and strangers,” the safety plan reads.
It stated that Tayla regularly disclosed information to her care team about things people might ask of her.
Inside the $2b system where kids are prey to child sex abusers
The safety plan listed keeping a close interest in who she was communicating with, not yelling at her or shaming her as preventative strategies.
“I felt dirty, and I felt like it was all my fault. It was absolutely wrong and it’s going to drive a lot of young people to hating themselves,” she said of the abuse.
Tayla is now 19 years old and no longer in the residential care system.
“I feel like they failed me in many aspects — from keeping me safe to setting me up in life,” she said.
“I always knew that one day I would get out and I’d be what I’d call normal again. I was deranged in resi, but I always knew that there was a light ahead of me when I got out.
“That hope kind of always kept me going.”
Tayla wanted to tell her story under her real name, but NSW is the only state where law prohibits naming adults who used to be in state care unless they are at least 25 years old.
CASPA aware of ‘risk’ of sexual harm
CASPA could not comment on individual cases due to privacy laws, but chief executive Naarah Rodwell said children who ended up in residential care had “a significant complex trauma journey”.
She said CASPA had a “large team” of clinical specialists, social workers and behaviour support practitioners who trained the care team and provided services to young people.
Ms Rodwell said staff took young people out for activities and included them in meal planning and grocery shopping.
“It sounds very basic, but those consistent routine-based, very normalised practises, all form part of the overarching theme of therapeutic care,” she said.
She said the organisation was constantly looking at ways to strengthen its practice in a system that relied on a significant level of coordination between many stakeholders.
Naarah Rodwell said the residential care system relied on a significant level of coordination between many stakeholders. (Supplied: CASPA)
“I will say in support of people who come into organisations like CASPA and do this work, they are just as much frontline first responders as police or healthcare professionals are, who face the risk of violence, abuse and exposure to trauma every day,” she said.
“So unlike other frontline sectors, they don’t necessarily have the same protections or support systems, which places them at significantly higher risk.
“And despite this, they continue to keep coming back and doing this work.”
Asked if sexual exploitation of residential care children was an issue at CASPA, Ms Rodwell said she heard about “the risk” of sexual harm week in, week out.
“I hear about actual things happening on a lesser basis, because often young people who may have placed themselves in an environment where they weren’t safe will take their time to actually disclose that information to a safe and trusted person in their care environment,” she said.
Staff rotation means care home workers can miss signs
Cathy Want, from support and counselling service Rosie’s Place, works with young people who have experienced sexual violence, many in the child protection system.
She said the constant rotation of workers through residential care homes meant staff could miss signs a child was falling into a cycle of abuse.
Cathy Want works at support and counselling service Rosie’s Place. (Supplied)
“They’re often also rostered onto several residential settings under the one main service, and so connection and attachment for kids … or even for workers to recognise patterns of behaviour of concern is going to be limited,” she said.
She believes a “savvy” and quick approach by adults can spark disclosures of abuse and assist intervention.
“If they’re not feeling judged and they’re actually feeling that someone’s interested in them, I think young people will readily share their experiences, I really do,” she said.
“Unless there is a fear of threats or retribution from whoever they’re involved with, or there is a fear of them being punished.
“If you can work through those fears, they will readily talk. And that’s not to a specialist counsellor — they’re talking to teachers that they have a connection with, they’re talking to the parents of their best friends.”
Ms Want believes a “savvy” and quick approach by adults can spark disclosures of abuse and assist intervention. (ABC News: Luke Bowden)
Until 2019, Jacque Ashworth was a support worker for children in CASPA’s care in NSW.
She provided mental health support to “extreme self-harmers”.
“I was constantly going to work wondering whether or not my young people were still alive,” she said.
She said the residential care system was wholly unsuited to vulnerable children’s needs.
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“[The children] would either have more meds given to them or some of the psychiatric team would tell the resi care workers to ignore those behaviours because they were attention-seeking behaviours,” she said.
“This loop just meant that we never addressed the core issue of why these young people are hurting themselves in such an extreme way.”
She said she quit the role with CASPA after a teenager awoke from a coma with no memory beyond early childhood, following a suicide attempt.
“I felt that there were things happening that were not OK and that there needed to be another level of advocacy for young people who were experiencing out-of-home care,” she said.
Ms Ashworth now runs The Concrete Club, an early intervention program that engages traumatised young people through skating.
Jacque Ashworth runs a program that engages traumatised young people through skating. (Supplied)
CASPA could not comment on the attempted suicide case but, more generally, Ms Rodwell said she was concerned about the lack of acute mental health services for at-risk children.
“This is the stuff that keeps me up at night and we are not an organisation that is quiet about this,” she said.
“In what world does a child, who is acutely mentally unwell and trying to take their own life, not receive the acute mental health care services that are funded to be available to them.”
The Department of Communities and Justice said it was unable to comment on individual cases, but that it was informed of significant incidents in care homes and followed up accordingly.
Kate Washington (left) said the NSW government was committed to reforming the child protection system. (AAP: Dean Lewins)
NSW Child Protection Minister Kate Washington said the government had been honest about the many challenges facing the child protection system and had announced a $1.2 billion package to reform out-of-home care.
“A core element of our reforms will be greater transparency and accountability for everyone involved in the system, including holding non-government providers to account if they are not delivering high-quality care,” she said.
*Names have been changed for legal reasons.