“First Nations peoples have the solutions, and we need to draw on their wisdom, their ways of knowing, being, and doing.”
Dr Jacynta Krakouer
Dr Jacynta Krakouer, UniSA Justice & Society’s inaugural Aboriginal Enterprise Fellow and ACCP member, leads SAFeST Start, the sixth branch of the MRFF-funded Replanting the Birthing Trees project. The SAFeST Start work and coalition was established from an alliance of academics and practitioners from across the nation who were concerned about the patterns emerging in rising numbers of infant removals affecting Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander families, seeking to build prevention strategies to help change this trajectory.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2023), Aboriginal infants were the group most likely (37.5 per 1,000 children) to have received child protection services in 2021-22. There were 1,470 unborn reports for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander babies in utero in that reporting year, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander infants were involved in child protection services at a rate of 198.1 per 1,000 - 8.1 times higher than non-Aboriginal infants.
Now formalised into the bedrock of the broader Replanting the Birthing Trees project, one of SAFeST Start’s primary aims is to co-design a Wise Counsel model of care, which aims to ensure that families at risk of intervention have access to Aboriginal-led, trauma-informed wrap-around care in the perinatal period that calls on the strength of traditional community ways and knowledge, safeguarding against notification to child protection.
Replanting the Birthing Trees organises its project streams to align with the strength of a Birthing Tree - a safe and sacred space used by Aboriginal women for millennia. The SAFeST Start stream represents the ‘Rich Earth/Country’ beneath the roots of the tree, identifying with the depth of Indigenous knowledges and world views.
