Governing through ‘ Othering’ : Problematising ‘culture’ in the NSW child protection system

Abstract

In the Australian child protection system, there is a growing emphasis on ‘culturally safe’ practices to better understand the cultural needs of racialised children and families. This article explores how ‘culture’ is represented in the NSW child protection system, drawing on an analysis of key policy documents. Using Carol Bacchi's ‘What's the problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) approach, this article draws attention to how ‘culture’ is institutionalised through policy and how racialised children and families are governed through the population category ‘Culturally and Linguistically Diverse’ (‘CALD’). The article finds that ‘culture talk’ is exclusively produced for racialised children and families, and that ‘CALD’ as a population category becomes knowable through policy directives around a set of performative ‘cultural’ tasks. In addition, throughout the policies ‘culture’ is associated with interpersonal experiences of racism rather than institutional racism. It is argued that this problematisation reinforces Otherness and invisibilises institutional Whiteness and racism.

Keywords

‘CALD’child protection culture othering WPR

Introduction

In liberal democracies, child protection has come to be accepted as an essential role of government in protecting children from harm and maltreatment. However, child protection systems have been critiqued as forms of coercive governing of families and children (Braithwaite, 2021; Copeland and Dettlaff, 2025; Dettlaff, 2025; Moore, 2008; Scourfield and Welsh, 2003) by focusing on correcting parenting behaviours that are deemed ‘abnormal’ (Edwards, 2016; Fernandez and Delfabbro, 2021). Similarly, Western child protection systems have been criticised for the persistent overrepresentation of racialised children and families. For example, in Australia recent research points to evidence of an increasing trajectory of children from non-White backgrounds in the out-of-home care system (Grace et al., 2025; Herbert et al., 2022; McMahon et al., 2021).

A growing international body of scholarship also highlights how racial disproportionality is intrinsically linked to histories of systematic racism (Akuoku-Barfi et al., 2021; Clarke et al., 2018; Edwards et al., 2023; Gosine and Pon, 2011; Mohamud et al., 2021; Thobani, 2007), particularly in the child protection systems of settler-colonial countries such as USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Dettlaff et al., 2020; Noorishad et al., 2023; Oates, 2020; Quinn et al., 2022). Similar patterns of racial disproportionality are observed in European and Nordic child welfare systems (Christie, 2010; Dalikeni, 2019; Grim, 2025; Hollekim et al., 2016; Karlsson, 2022; Tembo et al., 2021) indicating cultural biases in child welfare practices with ethnic-minority migrants.

In Australia, the genesis of the child protection system has been influenced by its counterparts in the UK and the USA in its function, purpose and structure (Young, 2008). Within the settler-colonial project of assimilation, Indigenous childrearing practices were deemed uncivilised and harmful and interventionist actions premised on notions of Whiteness dominated (Fernandez and Atwool, 2013; Krakouer, 2023). The result was that 10–30% of all Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities to ‘assimilate’ with the white culture (Wilson, 1997), in the period widely known as ‘The Stolen Generation’. While assimilation policies officially ended in 1970 with the dismantling of the White Australia Policy, the overrepresentation of Indigenous and other racialised children continues to be a persistent feature of the child protection system at every point of contact, from reporting to assessment, to entry into the Out-Of-Home-Care system (Katz and Connolly, 2019).

Australian child protection policies have attempted to attend to cultural and racial differences through consecutive policy reforms that mainly ensured adherence to the legislative and regulatory responsibilities (Gillingham, 2014; Lonne et al., 2013; McConnell et al., 2006) and the system's compliance to new public management (NPM) principles (Goodwin and Phillips, 2015). Across all Australian jurisdictions, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle was formally embedded in legislation, policy and practice in the early 1980s, yet in all states and territories high child removal rates and ongoing failures to meet the mandates to keep children with family and community (kinship care) persist. While the important body of critical policy analysis and advocacy regarding Indigenous experiences of the child welfare system heavily informs this article, our focus here is on policy responses to non-Indigenous racialised children and families – people from CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) communities.

This article explores how child protection policies in one Australian jurisdiction, NSW, contribute to the production of ‘CALD’ subjects and to consider how they are governed through practices of differentiation and subordination (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2025). More specifically, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the processes of (re)creating and institutionalising ‘culture’ in child protection policies and practices. Following the enshrinement of the Multicultural Act 2000 (New South Wales Government, 2000), the child protection agency (NSW Department of Communities and Justice, hereinafter referred to as DCJ) invested heavily to showcase its commitment to the cultural needs of ‘Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children and Families’ (hereinafter referred to as CALD) yet the raft of policies and practice guidelines associated with this development have not been closely scrutinised. Using Bacchi's analytic framework (2009, 2012) for interrogating how we are governed through problematisations, the article examines the ways the concept of ‘culture’ is deployed in the Children and Young People (Care and Protection) Act 1998 (hereinafter referred to as the Act) and the official policy documents of the NSW Child Protection agency, the NSW Department of Communities and Justice.

It should be noted from the outset that this article does not make an argument for or against use of ‘culturally sensitive’ practices in systems dealing with children, rather it examines how discursive practices in policy texts, particularly ‘culture talk’, operate to govern racialised families and children. Thus, the intention here is not to suggest that ‘cultural considerations’ are always inherently oppressive. The authors acknowledge the multiple ways in which culturally safe practices are constructed, conceptualised and practiced in different contexts; for example, culturally safety pedagogies developed by First Nations peoples in Australia and New Zealand or the African culturally safe concept of Ubuntu (Abdullah et al., 2023; Mulumba and Carvalho, 2024; Ngobese, 2025). Rather, this article captures the ways in which a particular policy discourse (“culture talk”) is being associated with a particular people category (CALD) in a particular spatial context (NSW child protection system), in order to disrupt ways of thinking about commonly accepted categories and governing practices.

The article begins with a brief overview of some of the underlying epistemological principles of the NSW Child protection system since its inception, in order to historically situate the institutionalisation of ‘culture’ as a child protection problem. Through a Critical Whiteness lens, it is suggested that Western ideas of childhood and parenting are constructed as the norm against which all other non-White parenting practices are assessed. After introducing the analytical framework and methodology, the article explores the representations of ‘culture’ within key policy documents and practice guidelines, drawing attention to its characterisation as a particular kind of policy artefact; one that is exclusively produced for racialised children and families, and associated with interpersonal experiences of racism, invisibilising institutional Whiteness and racism.

The article aims to invite the broader international readership to think otherwise about the racializing effects of culture-oriented discourses in child protection policies and to examine the possibility that ‘culture talk’ can reproduce the very ‘problems’ they intend to address (Bacchi, 2026). Although this article focuses on Australia, the findings have implications for other Western and European child welfare systems with similar challenges.

Whiteness and the politics of ‘culture’ in child protection

Over the past decades, there has been an increase in scholarly work critiquing the underlying epistemological principles upon which Western child protection systems are established. For example, since its inception, NSW child protection system has been predominantly influenced by Eurocentric constructs of family and culture that privilege individualism, autonomy and self-reliance (Luu et al., 2024; Tascón and Ife, 2019). Eurocentric theories of attachment and stage development are consistently and pervasively referenced across child protection systems policies and practice mandates (Hofstede, 1980). Consequently, these Western ideas of childhood and parenting are constructed as the norm against which all other non-White parenting practices are assessed. Thus, child protection interventions are often seen as a response to families’ failure to demonstrate acceptable ‘White-centric’ parenting capacity (Welbourne and Dixon, 2015).

In line with critical whiteness theory, Whiteness becomes a central conceptual tool in the framing of our analysis. In this article, Whiteness is understood as a political category operating through institutionalised practices that privilege certain ways of knowing, doing and being in order to produce and reproduce racial dominance (Nicoll, 2004; Olcoń and Ravulo, 2024). Critical scholar Ahmed (2020) relates the language of institutional ‘diversity’ to institutional whiteness. She argues that under the guise of diversity talk, the problem of whiteness is reconstituted as a problem of the different ‘other’ rather than an institutional problem (Ahmed, 2018, 2004; Dobusch, 2017; Udah, 2021, 2024). In this way, it can be argued that the mere inclusion of the specific category of ‘CALD’¹ in government policies constitutes a racialising process.

According to Murji and Solomos (2005: 3), racialisation is

…the processes by which racial meanings are attached to issues, often treated as social problems, and with the manner in which race appears to be a, or often the key factor in the ways they are defined and understood.

The term CALD as it is used in Australia is contested. Nipperess and Williams (2019), for example, ask “Culturally and Linguistically Diverse from Who? Are second-, third and fourth generation Australians still ‘CALD’? When does an immigrant become a settler?” (p. 20). Through this contested terminology, particular ethnic groups continue to be constructed as the essentialised ‘other’ (Adusei-Asante and Adibi, 2018; Maturi and Munro, 2023; Pithavadian and Bhat, 2023). It is important to note that this distinction is made along racial lines, however presented as linguistic and cultural differences. Within the international context, the term CALD is equivalent to the term Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) used in the UK, and People of Colour (POC) used in the USA as a population category. Such racial categories are summoned in order to distinguish the white population from any foreign ‘other’, thereby producing racial binaries. Recognising the contingency of the category CALD and its relationship to Whiteness provides the rationale for exploring how culture is problematised in NSW child protection policies.

Methods: Applying a problematisation approach to child protection policy

This article adopts Bacchi’s (1999, 2009, 2012) What's the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) framework as the analytic method. The WPR approach has its genesis in Foucault-influenced poststructuralism: the goal is to examine the discursive practices through which governing takes place by asking questions about how ‘problems’ are represented in policies. The starting point for Bacchi's WPR approach is that government policies do not simply solve ‘problems’, rather they are constitutive of them (Bacchi, 2012, 22). According to Bacchi, any ‘problem’ that a policy intends to address is not pre-given but instead is created through the discursive practices that give it meaning.

A central idea in understanding policy in this way is that policies govern populations through problematizations and the proposals that flow from them. As Bacchi and Goodwin (2025) state “The WPR approach starts from a simple idea: that what we propose to do about something indicates what we think needs to change and hence what we think the “problem” is”. Since policies are posited as constitutive of social problems, the analytic task is to critically consider the problem representations lodged in policies, by “working ‘backwards” from policy proposals” (Goodwin, 2012). Interrogating problem representations includes considering the deep-seated assumptions, binaries and categories within policy discourses (Bacchi, 2009). Through a series of seven processes (Bacchi, 2026), the WPR approach encourages questioning of how policy ‘problems’ are represented in any given policy proposals by asking:

1.What is the problem represented to be?

2.What presuppositions or assumptions underpin the representation of the ‘problem’?

3.How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?

4.What is left unproblematic in this ‘problem’ of representation?

5.What effects are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

6.How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How could it be questioned, disrupted and replaced?

Step 7: Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations.

(Bacchi and Goodwin, 2025, 22).

It should be noted that the WPR approach is not concerned with the intentions of policy actors or legislators, rather the focus of the analysis is on the conceptual logics and knowledge regimes that make specific statements within policy proposals sayable and intelligible. Examining policy documents through the lens of the WPR approach promotes the idea of ‘thinking otherwise’, and providing alternative ways of thinking about accepted “categories and governing practices” (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2025, 13).

In addition, the focus of our analysis is on the broad effects of how “culture” is problematized in policy texts, rather than on children and families’ experiences of the child protection system. While other research approaches are used to capture the ‘lived experiences’ of racialised families encountering child welfare systems (Dalikeni, 2019; Merritt, 2021; Wilson et al., 2023) -sometimes in order to compare ‘real’ experiences with policy constructs - the WPR approach focuses on how policy problematisations within policy documents produce effects, including “lived effects”. Further, in our analysis, it is presupposed that racialised communities negotiate and resist the subjectification processes that are produced in policy, and indeed this analysis seeks to contribute to this activity by making discursive politics associated with ‘culture’ visible.

Analysing the policy documents:

Policy texts are generally considered primary sites to identify and describe policy ‘problems’, and the starting point for accessing ‘problematising activities’ (Bacchi, 2009). In this article, the analysis examines the NSW Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 and a set of key policy documents produced by the NSW Department of Communities and Justice. These documents were included because of their reference to culture or to working with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities (‘CALD’). A total of seven policy documents were reviewed:

NSW Care and Protection Act 1998 ( New South Wales Government, 1998 ),

NSW Practice Framework standards for child protection and out of home care practitioners 2020 ( Office of Senior Practitioner, 2020 ),

Culturally Responsive Practice with Diverse Communities practice advice ( New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice, n.d. ),

Your Story, Culture and Identity practice advice ( New South Wales Government, n.d.-c ),

Caring for Kids Guide ( New South Wales Government, n.d.-b ),

Caring for Children from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds practice advice ( New South Wales Government, n.d.-a ).

DCJ 2023-2024 Annual Report – Performance and Activities (Department of Communities and Justice, 2024)

The starting point for the analysis involved close reading of the seven documents to identify key problem representations (WPR Q1). The specific provisions that reference culture, cultural rights and cultural competency and other formulations of the ‘culture problem’ were identified and the specific statements and associated proposals associated formed a bank of discursive practices for analysis. The terms and phrases, categories and binaries, concepts and rationales relating to ‘culture’ that appeared across the corpus of documents were considered in terms of their underlying assumptions and histories (WPR Q 2&3). Silences and omissions -what terms, concepts, categories etc. go unmentioned - were also considered (WPR Q4). The discursive practices within each document were compared and contrasted to identify the shared and specific contours of ‘culture talk’ as represented in these policy proposals, as well as their effects (WPR Q.5) and disruptions (WPRQ.6).

In the following findings section, we discuss four of the problem representations that emerged from the analysis: (1) the representation of ‘culture’ as applicable to all; (2) the representation of ‘culture’ as applicable to CALD; (3) the representation of ‘culture work’ and (4) the representation of ‘racism’. Excerpts from the policy texts are included to illustrate each of these findings.

Findings

The representation of ‘culture’ in the NSW Care and Protection Act

NSW Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act (New South Wales Government, 1998) is the governing legislative framework guiding the state's legal responsibilities in protecting children. Broadly speaking, the legislation stipulates specific cultural provisions for Aboriginal children known as Aboriginal Child Placement principles. Outside these specific Indigenous-only articles, the Act attends to the importance of ‘cultural connection’ in two separate sections: firstly, in Section 9(2) and in Section 78 and 78A.

In Section 9(2) Principles for Administration of the Act, it stipulates that decisions about parental responsibility must account for ‘culture’ alongside other factors (Section 9(2)b). In addition, it states that those who are removed temporarily or permanently from their family, are “entitled to special protection and assistance from the state, and his or her name, identity, language, cultural and religious ties should, as far as possible, be preserved” (Section 9(2) d). Regarding S78 and S78A, which relates to permanency planning, the legislation mandates the development of cultural plans and under section Schedule 3 of the 2022 Children and Young People regulation, it is specified that care plans include:

(d) the cultural and linguistic background and religion of the child or young person,

(g) issues of social, cultural, educational or economic significance in relation to the child or young person or the child or young person's family.

In this way, legislative provisions that reference the importance of cultural maintenance and connection are directed towards ‘all’ children and young persons who come in contact with the statutory child protection system regardless of their race, ethnicity or religion.

The representation of ‘culture’ in the practice guidelines

The NSW Practice Framework, consisting of 5 capabilities and 11 practice standards, sets out the expected practice standards to be demonstrated by child protection practitioners (Office of Senior Practitioner, 2020: 5). Out of these 11 standards, Standard 2 pertains specifically to culturally safe practice with Aboriginal communities and Standard 3 to CALD communities.

Standard 2 ‘Culturally safe practice with Aboriginal communities’ is understood align with the agency's legislative requirement to adhere to the Aboriginal Child Placement Principles (see above). The inclusion of ‘culture’ provisions exclusively applicable to CALD families reveals a disjunction between the legislative reference to cultural rights for all children and the positioning of cultural rights as exclusively for ‘CALD’ communities. For example, Standard 3 ‘Culturally safe practice with diverse communities’ (p. 17) and the ‘Cultural identity and Life Story’ practice advice highlight that “cultural plans are expected to be intact aiming at fostering cultural connection for ‘CALD’ communities”.

While this statement encourages an association of ‘culture’ with racialised children and families, it concurrently frames the dominant white population as a-cultured as they are neither racialized nor labelled (Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Pham et al., 2021; van Noppen et al., 2023; Young, 2008). This further indicates a homogenised and essentialised construction of ‘culture’ by assuming that the ‘culture’ of all ‘CALD’ families is fixed and one-dimensional, overshadowing any individual identity within that particular group (Dobusch, 2017). This specification of ‘culture’ as belonging to CALD communities (in a fixed and uniform way) contributes to the categorising of families and children against White Anglo-culture.

While there is no explicit definition of ‘culture’, the documents refer to various indicators of ‘culturally safe practices’, which implies certain understandings of ‘culture’. For example, in ‘Caring for Children from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds’ practice advice, practical ways to support ‘cultural maintenance’ include to

…purchase books, toys and entertainment material that reflect the language and culture of the child’, the carer is also encouraged to ‘reside in areas with a culturally diverse population’, ‘include information about the child's history, cultural and religious heritage’ (New South Wales Government, n.d.-a) (p. 3).

These statements presuppose that a ‘CALD’ child can become knowable through a set of actions. In this way, the exclusive focus on the culture of racialised families and children indirectly invisibles the culture of the non-racialised families by omission. Additionally, the Caring for Kids Guide (New South Wales Government, n.d.-b)’ includes a direction to practitioners to ‘gather information about the community the child comes from’ (p.94). There is also an overwhelming emphasis in the ‘Your Story, Culture and Identity’ guide on the importance of the ‘CALD’ child being able to have ‘certain foods they like eating’, ‘practice particular cultural beliefs’, and ‘to have days they celebrate’ (p. 3).

The documents do not represent meanings of culture as something that can be self-articulated by ‘CALD’ children and families. This is evidenced through the use of directive language in the form of the use of the pronoun ‘we’, repeated 21 times in and the ‘Caring for Children from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds’ practice advice and through the use of directive verbs to convey actions required by the child protection practitioners and/or carers. For example, the practice advice document stipulates

We establish regular contact with people of other cultural backgrounds in our lives, we learn about the child's cultural, linguistic background, we reside in areas with a culturally diverse population (p. 3–5).

The use of ‘we’ suggests that the professionals are not CALD, and that ‘culture’ can only be true and present if a professional implements a cultural plan or ‘maintenance’. If a professional fails to implement a cultural plan, the implication is that culture might be lost. By contrast, cultural plans are not required for non-racialised families where this distinction reinforces differencing practices (Bacchi, 2026: 132) between the invisible White culture and the racialised ‘other’.

The achievement of ‘culturally safe practices’ becomes contingent on the practitioners’ or carer's ability to perform these ‘desired’ actions, emphasising the centrality of the practitioner and carer and the marginality of the ‘CALD’ child or family. In addition, the reference to “cultural indicators” suggests that working with ‘CALD’ people has been reduced to an information gathering exercise.

According to these documents, culture is:

–food (p. 3 of Your story, culture and identity and p. 94 of Caring for kids Guide)

–geographical location (p. 3 of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds, p. 94 of Caring for kids Guide)

–books that contain cultural representation (p. 3 of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds, p. 94 of Caring for kids Guide)

–language (p. 94 of Caring for kids Guide, p. 4 of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds)

–religion (p. 3 of Your story, culture and identity, p. 3 of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds, p. 94 of Caring for kids Guide)

–spirituality (p. 3 of Your story, culture and identity)

–different child rearing practices (p. 16 of NSW Practice Standards Framework)

–a country of origin (p. 96 and 97 of Caring for kids Guide)

–cultural days of celebration (p. 3 of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds, p. 96 of Caring for kids Guide)

–a contactable and accessible community (p. 3 of Your story, culture and identity, (p. 3 of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds, p. 94 of Caring for kids Guide)

Thus ‘culture’ is treated as an object, to be given and lost, and given back. It's important to note that cultural plans were intended for Aboriginal families whose cultural identity was violently and intentionally eradicated in the stolen generations, via child removal. Despite a recognition of Australia's past colonial tactics to eradicate ‘culture’ via child removal (Yu et al., 2024), not-removing children is not considered ‘cultural maintenance’. The possibility of not-removing children from their parents’ care to sustain culture, is entirely absent in these documents. The documents discussed above that pertain to non-Indigenous children and families only make culture thinkable via a list of general statements. This discursive practice operates to obscure the idea that removing a child from family is by default also removing them from their culture. The silence has been well considered in critique of Indigenous ‘cultural safety’ practices and Indigenous scholarship proposes that genuine ‘cultural maintenance’ may require a rethink of the system's mandated ability to enact child removal (Hamilton et al., 2021; Krakouer et al., 2018; Newton, 2020; Newton et al., 2025).

The representation (and measurement) of ‘culture’ work

Across the policy documents, ‘culture’ work is referred to using the following terms: Culturally safe practices, cultural maintenance, cultural awareness, cultural understanding, cultural support, culturally responsive practice, cultural connection. Accordingly, ‘culture’ work is constructed as a performative skill to be ‘practiced’, ‘maintained’, ‘be aware of’, ‘understood’, ‘supported’, ‘responded to’, and ‘connected with’.

Child protection practitioners are encouraged to use ‘multicultural consultations’, ‘multicultural services’, ‘using qualified interpreter’, ‘translate important correspondence’, ‘carrying out cultural planning’ (OSP, 2020, 16 and 17). The child protection practitioner is encouraged to develop cultural support plans for ‘CALD’ children through: ‘completing a genogram’, ‘understanding your country of origin, language groups, linguistic background religious/spiritual background, and communities of belonging’ (Your Story, Culture and Identity Practice Advice, p. 3) Likewise, the DCJ 2023–2024 annual report placed great emphasis on: tracking and reporting the number of ‘cultural consultations requests’, facilitation of ‘Multicultural caseworker Bi-annual development forum’, delivering ‘culturally reflective practice workshops and training sessions’ to staff and community partners, and the production of ‘translated resources and information sheets in 26 languages’ (pp. 286–288). Tracking ‘culture’ work through measurable outcomes is used as ‘evidence’ that the institution is ‘culturally responsive’ and that ‘culture’ is preserved. However, there is a risk here of equating high numbers of consultations or trainings delivered with positive outcomes for racialised families, given the difficulty in assessing the relationship between these performative tasks and outcomes for ‘CALD’ families.

Interwoven with the discourse of ‘culture’ as a measurable skill, is the presupposition of the role of ‘cultural brokers’ (Barn and Das, 2016) in the role of ‘Multicultural caseworker for a targeted community’ who represents a ‘point of call’ or ‘go to’ (Sawrikar and Katz, 2014) or as ‘cultural expert’ (Yassine and Tseris, 2022). According to the ‘Culturally responsive practice with diverse communities’ practice guide, the child practitioner is encouraged to utilise ‘multicultural consultation’ in order to ‘build understanding to the cultural background and practices of the family’, ‘to identify culturally appropriate services and to engage in the process and seeking specific knowledges, skills and assistance to meet the family needs’ (p. 2). This representation assumes that the practitioner will eventually learn about different parenting practices through the multicultural consultation, thus this statement reflects by omission that White parenting practices are the norm, while other ‘different’ parenting practices need to be explored. In a similar vein, the multicultural caseworker's role, according to the latter document, is to ensure, through providing consultations to the child protection practitioner, that “harmful or neglectful behaviours are not labelled and dismissed as cultural practice’ (p. 2 n.b). This statement demonstrates an unexamined acceptance of a link between culture and neglect and harm. The multicultural worker is positioned to be policing ‘culture’, and the CALD family as ‘suspect’. Only a ‘CALD’ parent could use ‘culture’ as an ‘excuse’ for the reported child protection concerns. The multicultural case worker is used to filter truth from lies, whereas this is not required for white parents and thus suspicion is not required. From a Whiteness perspective, this statement invites a weaponisation of cultural knowledge, used to signal, and flag ‘deceit’. Here, the connection is (re) made; culture as neglect/harm, something that is excised from representations of White families and children.

The representation of racism

Throughout the policy documents, an association between the ‘culture’ of racialised children and families and their experiences of racism is made. The Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds Practice Advice document identifies key culturally aware attributes that carers should demonstrate. These include the carer's ability to ‘examine and understand the role of race in shaping your attitudes, beliefs and practices…and interactions with members of culturally diverse communities’ (p. 2). Additionally, the same document leverages an academic study by a white American scholar, Vonk (2001) to outline practical ways in which the carers can support CALD children. In her article, and notably not cited in the DCJ guidelines, she proposes recommendations that will “…enable them to help their children develop positive racial identities and survival skills for life in a racist society” (p. 246, our emphasis).

In the Caring for Children from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds practice advice, there is an implicit assumption about the racial identity of the carer which is assumed to be white. The imagined white carer is constructed as neither understanding of, nor having experienced racism and discrimination. Thus, an association between racism and being ‘CALD’ is made. Furthermore, child protection practitioners are positioned to be responsible to uphold an anti-racist practice and ‘Reflect on your own cultural values, question your assumptions and to be aware of possible cultural bias and practice in non-discriminatory ways’ (OSP, 2020: 13–16).

The sole focus on the practitioner's and carer's attitudes as potential sites for racism presuppose that racism is experienced as a result of ‘cultural bias’ and ‘personal prejudices’. There is no allusion made to the “racist society” from Elizabeth Vonk's study, the racialisation effect of the institutional policies such as standardised assessment tools, and mandatory reporting laws. The document only makes space for interpersonal racism as the only form of racism experienced by racialised children and families. As such, institutional responsibility to address racism is shifted and the very institutional power that DCJ holds is overlooked. In other words, the assumption lodged within this articulation of racism is that it is a product of individual attitudes, beliefs and behaviours rather than understood as a structural and institutional ‘problem’ (see Ahmed, 2004).

In Caring for Children from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds document, the practice advice continues with suggesting that the carers should assist ‘CALD’ children and young people in “developing positive strategies for coping with the issue”. The same suggestion is echoed in the Caring for Kids Guide which outlines a set of actions to be taken to tackle racism and discrimination:

Kids from diverse backgrounds may face racism or discrimination. Let them know that racism is not okay. Speak out against it when you see it. Encourage your child's pride and resilience. Give them strategies for responding calmly and productively to racism and discrimination (p. 95).

In these statements, the omission of the performer or “doer” of racism reinforces the victimhood of racialised children and families and shifts attention from the racist to the racialised.

The Helping ‘CALD’ Children respond to racism, prejudice and discrimination section of Caring for children from diverse cultural backgrounds practice advice, a set of actions available to the carers to assist ‘CALD’ children who experience racism is presented. These include ‘educate the child about the realities of racism, help the child deal with racism through open discussion, help the child understand that being discriminated against does not reflect personal shortcomings and validate their feeling’ (p. 4). In this statement, the presuppositions are that

–Children are not educated about racism, and education may solve racism

–Racism should be accepted as a ‘reality’, it simply exists.

–Children should be able to ‘deal’ with racism

–Racism should be ‘dealt’ with, this may make it easier to live with the reality of racism

–A child may take discrimination personally and mistakenly believe that discrimination occurs because of their own shortcomings. The way to address this is to say it is not so.

–Feelings, rather than the racist experience, should be the focus

Quite strikingly, there are no suggestions to actively resist racism, for either the child or the carer. Additionally, the use of the word ‘realities of racism’ implies the normalisation of racism and presents it as inevitable due to the inherent powerlessness of ‘CALD’ children and families. Thus, the ‘culture’ of ‘CALD’ in itself is being framed as a factor in experiencing racism through association. The documents analysed represent racism as a particular type of problem, one that is located in individuals, quite a distance from the institution that has removed the child from their culture and community. Constituting racism as an interpersonal ‘problem’ and as a normalised experience, located and experienced outside the institution, invisiblises structural forms of racism and violence towards racialised communities.

Discussion and conclusions

The central argument in this article is not that the cultural needs of racialised children and families in child protection practices should not be addressed. Instead, the purpose in this article is to interrogate the assumptions underpinning the institutionalising of ‘culture’ as a solution in the NSW child protection system. This is achieved through applying Bacchi's WPR approach that starts from the premise that government policies produce the ‘problems’ they intend to address. By ‘working backwards’ from policy proposals (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2025), we can interrogate problem representations and their effects (Bacchi, 2009, 2012).

Focusing on seven key policy documents and statements, this article argues that ‘culture talk’ is exclusively produced for racialised children and families. Whilst the legislation alludes to the importance of attending to the cultural rights of all children, key policy documents specify cultural practices are reserved for racialised children and families. Moreover, ‘culture’ is constructed as only knowable through a set of indicators garnered through information gathering on country of origin, cultural and religious practices and ‘lifestyle’. Additionally, ‘culture’ is being framed as homogenous and fixed that can be understood through performative tasks such as cultural competency training or multicultural consultations. This problem representation replicates an essentialist view of the ‘culture’ of the Other. There is also an emphasis on associating the ‘culture’ of the Other with interpersonal racism, overlooking institutional practices that perpetuate racism, leaving no room for the institution to be a perpetrator of racism or cultural unsafety by virtue of its role.

The analysis thus fits within the existing literature that has examined the role of child protection system as forms of coercive welfare which continue to govern children and families in racializing (rather than neutral) ways (Braithwaite, 2021; Edwards, 2016; Moore, 2008; Scourfield and Welsh, 2003). The findings also echo Ahmed’s (2018, 2020) argument about how institutional whiteness is reproduced through the language of diversity. As Udah (2024) explains “whiteness is the absent centre against which others (non -whites) are perceived as inferior, marginal, undesirable, uncivilised and deviant”. Thus, the invisible operation of Whiteness can be seen to produce and reproduce practices of ‘othering’ of non-white people (Udah, 2021). In child protection, Whiteness manifests in the implicit normalisation of Western notions of parenting and child rearing practices while simultaneously othering non-Western ways of parenting, even in policies developed to respond to ‘culture’ in multicultural societies.

The introduction of policy reforms, practice guidelines, trainings, tools and so forth have all been produced as well-intentioned approaches to improving the experiences of racialised children and families encountering the child protection system. Indeed, some of the policies mapped out in this article have been advocated for and by groups most impacted by cultural bias in the system. Yet, despite the raft of governmental strategies, overrepresentation of racialised people and the racialisation of ‘child protection’ persists. What else might be needed? We suggest that attention to discursive practices provides a basis to counter ‘othering’. For example, directives that shore up white standards and/or assume white professionals within policy may be revised, reinventing ‘standards’ and ‘practitioners’ in new ways. Understanding ‘culture’ as applicable to all children and families may disrupt the racializing effects of policies and practices. Acknowledging institutional racism and taking on board critiques that posit the systems themselves as implicated in the ‘problem’ is another avenue forward.

This kind of analysis is applicable to other western child protection systems in which similar ‘culturally sensitive’ practices are in place. In the UK for example, the child protection system continues to be critiqued on how its current policies and processes deepen the racialisation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) populations. Similarly, in Canada, Blacks and African-Canadian families continue to be governed through colour-blind policies that are implicitly targeting them (Noorishad et al., 2023). From this perspective, future research might further interrogate how child protection practitioners problematise ‘culture’ and how the problematisations in the policies they are subject to resonate in their day-to-day practices This approach may provide access to further information about how the othering racialised children and families is being resisted, disrupted or even replaced, both in Australia and elsewhere.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Esraa Mohamed

Lobna Yassine

Susan Goodwin

Notes

Author biographies

Esraa Mohaned is a PhD candidate and a sessional academic at the University of Sydney. Esraa has extensive frontline social work experience in the child protection system.

Lobna Yassine is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Policy Studies at the University of Sydney.

Susan Goodwin is a Professor of Policy Studies at the University of Sydney. She is co-author, with Carol Bacchi, of Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (Palgrave, 2025).

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