Children’s contact services: On servicing and respecting children’s identity

This article offers a brief notation on the First International Conference on Child Access Services, held in Paris on 4–7 November 1998. The author raises some questions which took shape at the Conference and notes the contrasting representations in different countries of the disciplines involved in establishing and running Child Contact Centres and how these may contribute to the contrast in ideology and philosophy in the setting up and running of these centres and the services they offer. The author’s knowledge of the French contact centre models provides a basis for looking at the establishment of Australian centres, both government and non-government funded. The French centres’ paramount goal to develop respect for the child as a person and uphold his legal position by equipping him with a sense of his history and roots, and by fostering respect between the parents, is seen as a more comprehensible concept than the ambiguous ‘best interest of the child’ goal upheld in Anglo-Saxon countries. Moreover, the length of involvement with families in the French centres is contrasted with the shorter period needed to secure the child’s physical safety. The article concludes with the hope that Australian centres are at the threshold of developing an adjunct facilitative structure that would allow progress within the families referred to them and offers as a parting note some recent American research findings on the profile of families using visitation services and of the providers of such services.