NT child protection report shows DV was major risk to Kumanjayi Little Baby

Over the past week, the face of a five-year-old girl has been splashed across the media alongside headlines about extensive failures in child protection in the Northern Territory.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the image of an Indigenous person who has died, used with the permission of her family.

In late April, the body of the missing girl, now referred to as Kumanjayi Little Baby for cultural reasons, was found on the outskirts of the Old Timers town camp in Alice Springs.

The news frenzy followed the release of a much-anticipated review of how the Department of Children and Families (DCF) responded to notifications relating to Kumanjayi Little Baby throughout her life.

Two days after the report was published, a leak of confidential information to the media led to front-page reports that the girl's alleged murderer, Jefferson Lewis, was one of five people listed on a safety plan in 2021.

In NT parliament on Thursday, questions were hurled across the floor about where the leak came from and whether there would be an investigation.

The significance of Lewis being named on the plan will no doubt be subject to further scrutiny; however, what seems to have been lost in the debate is why that safety plan was needed in the first place.

Based on the notifications detailed in the report, the biggest risk identified to Kumanjayi and her mother's safety was her father.

Review recommendations echo 'uninspiring' coronial report

The report documents how Kumanjayi's contact with child protection was linked exclusively to repeated instances of family and domestic violence perpetrated by her father primarily against her mother, resulting in 14 notifications since 2020.

Five of these notifications occurred in the weeks leading up to her death.

Children and Families Minister Robyn Cahill acknowledged the escalating domestic violence Kumanjayi was exposed to, saying "the system in place did not support recognition of the risk this placed Kumanjayi Little Baby in".

Successive governments, including the incumbent Country Liberal Party, have been given countless recommendations aimed at addressing the NT's staggering rates of domestic, family and sexual violence, with an intimate partner homicide rate seven times the national average.

In November 2024, the NT Coroner made 35 recommendations following a joint inquest into the domestic violence deaths of four Aboriginal women.

Months later, Ms Cahill, acting in her role as minister for domestic violence prevention, described the recommendations as "uninspiring", claiming the report had "failed dismally to hit the mark".

A little over a year later, the review into DCF has made 45 recommendations which sector representatives have pointed out bear strong similarities — the need for better coordination between agencies, recognising and assessing risk more effectively, and the need for greater resourcing.

The chief executive of the North Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency, Ben Grimes, said while he broadly supported the recommendations, they were "nothing new".

"If the minister was actually serious about putting the interests of children first, she would have started listening to the coroner's recommendations and the recommendations of frontline organisations two years ago, and we could be two years ahead of where we are today," he said.

'Punishing victims through child removal'

The report said Kumanjayi's child protection notification history demonstrated DCF had "repeated opportunities over a number of years to consider the child's circumstances in the context of an ongoing pattern of DFV".

The report went on to say an inability of the department to "identify and assess the cumulative impact of multiple reports" meant "the pattern of harm and the ongoing impact of the violence on the children and family environment" was "not fully recognised".

"KLB's mother was effectively left with the responsibility of protecting her children while experiencing [domestic, family violence] herself, without DCF adequately identifying the risks posed by the [domestic, family violence] perpetrator's behaviour and the impact of the violence on the children," the report said.

Child protection researcher and expert Jacynta Krakouer said the report's framing of domestic and family violence as a child protection issue could lead to victim survivors being inadvertently "punished through removal" of their children.

"This is an issue that requires more than a child protection response," she said.

"Family violence requires resources; it requires specialist family support services … it requires a police response and a monitoring of the perpetrator," she said.

"We create a system which child protection notes the violence, highlights there are risks and then responds through removal."

Earlier this week Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss raised similar concerns and urged the government to match the recommendations in the report with adequate support for vulnerable parents.

"Without those supports, there is a real danger that failures of the system are conflated with the parenting capacity of the person experiencing violence," she said.

The government has accepted all 45 recommendations from the child protection review, but it still has many asking if the focus on a single department — though warranted — will result in any real change.

There are also fears that without sustained consultation and adequate resourcing, the report risks becoming yet another addition to the "mountain of reports" Ms Cahill herself acknowledged had been "filed and forgotten".