Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 69
The most challenging thing I’ve done in my career is the area of child protection. In the early
2000s, I was a consultant working with government. I’d never done very much work
in child protection, and it’s a very confronting space. We wanted to change the way that
child protection was being done—more child-focused; understanding what happened
with children when they were in the child protection system; how the system itself can
do quite a bit of damage—but not with intent—because people and children in the system
bounce around, in and out of families. And we looked at the data around their lives and
their trajectories through life. It was the first time that had been done. And it really changed
the way people thought about what we were doing. It was very hard because very, very
good people had been working in that space for a long time, and they had very established
practices and ways of doing things.
Mary Ann O’Loughlin
Photographer Pat Russell, 2017
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