Gabriella

‘When I left child safety, I could have been taught how to be a mum, how to protect a child. I shouldn’t have been told I would have my kids taken away from me.’

Gabriella is in her mid-20s and has intellectual disability. When she was in primary school, child protection services placed her in care after her mother’s partner sexually abused her.

Later, in her early teens, they put her in a juvenile detention centre. ‘I was at a lot of different schools. I was hanging around with the wrong people,’ Gabriella told the Royal Commission. The agency warned her that if she ever had children, they would take them away from her.

‘I didn't like it … that they said that. That made me feel like I couldn’t have kids, that made me feel worried.’

But that is exactly what happened a few years ago when Gabriella fell pregnant with her first child.

Child services registered Gabriella’s mother, who she was living with, as primary carer of her daughter, despite their ‘problematic relationship’. Gabriella said it was ‘very stressful and confusing’ because the agency had seen fit to take her off her mother when she was a child.

‘It’s almost like double standards … I couldn't go anywhere with (my baby) if mum wasn't with me.’

A couple of months after giving birth, Gabriella and her mum had a fight. The government removed the child from the family altogether. Gabriella’s social worker, Sarah, told the Royal Commission there had been ‘no allegations of neglect … no signs of neglect’.

Gabriella said that in foster care, her child went from being ‘a happy, smiling little girl to a very sad looking baby’. She saw signs of neglect and abuse.

‘When she first went into care, she used to come to visit with really, really wet nappies. She had bruises on her toes … she had lice in her hair. She never had bruises on her apart from when she went into child safety's care.’

Gabriella told child protection officers she would not give her daughter back ‘because she’s been harmed’. She wanted to speak to her lawyer, but they refused.

The agency eventually placed three of Gabriella’s children in foster care. One child was taken from her at birth.

‘She did everything she could to fight to get them back,’ Sarah said. ‘Then bang, they’re home.’

The government recently returned the children to Gabriella without helping her get any supports in place.

‘So they take the kids because she's got an intellectual disability, but they won't do anything to then help her because she's got an intellectual disability,’ Sarah said. ‘If you wanted to know the wrong way to go about doing things with someone with an intellectual disability, they've done it.’

Gabriella told the Royal Commission that people with intellectual disability can be good parents. She’s finding if ‘challenging but doable’. If she’d been given the right supports in the first place, things would have been different.

‘Child safety should have found me a house, they should have found me people to have around me. They took my network away from me when they took my mum away. They should have made sure I had people who were like a family to me.’