THE STATE SENT HIM BACK TO HIS ABUSER

A magistrate found a stepfather had sexually abused two small children. Fifteen days later the Department invited him to a meeting about their future and agreed to send them back to him. When the boy sued the State decades on, it told a judge his evidence had taken it by surprise.

By Jordan Vale | WA in Focus

In July 1988 the Department for Community Services took an eight year old boy and his five year old sister out of their home. The boy had said their stepfather was sexually abusing them.

A Children's Court magistrate believed him. On 5 December 1988, satisfied the stepfather had abused both children and rejecting the mother's insistence that nothing had happened, he made them wards of the State under the Child Welfare Act.

Fifteen days later, departmental officers met to work out what came next. They invited the stepfather to sit in on part of the meeting. They invited the mother, who had denied throughout that the abuse occurred. And they settled on a long term plan to send the children home to both of them. The boy went back on 14 April 1989.

Judge Black of the District Court set out what she made of that in a judgment delivered on 9 September 2025. Even allowing for hindsight, and for how much less was understood about child sexual abuse in the late 1980s, she wrote at paragraph 101, the approach the Department recommended and the Director General accepted was "startling and incomprehensible".

The plaintiff, who can only be identified as DB, was awarded $2,846,960.69.

FIFTEEN DAYS

DB sued the State and the Children and Community Services Ministerial Body in 2021. The trial took eighteen sitting days across January and February 2025. Maurice Blackburn acted for him. Minter Ellison acted for the State.

The question was whether the Director General, as DB's legal guardian, owed him a duty of care. Judge Black found the duty existed and that it was breached more than once.

One breach the State had already given up. Before trial it accepted that returning DB to his stepfather in April 1989 was a breach of duty, while arguing this created no liability for anyone. The judge found the breach made out at paragraph 538 and held the State vicariously liable for the Director General's negligence.

She was blunt about the December 1988 meeting itself. The evidence the State called, she wrote at paragraph 103, produced no satisfactory reason why the stepfather and mother were allowed to attend, let alone why the Department's goal was to reunify the children with their abuser. One officer told the court it was standard practice to invite parents. Standard practice, the judge replied at paragraph 104, should always give way to reasoned judgment.

THE FILE FILLS UP

The second breach concerned what happened after the stepfather.

In April 1990 DB went to live with his father. Over the months that followed the Department's file thickened: allegations of past violence, a violence restraining order, a criminal record, appointments missed, rent unpaid.

On 14 September 1990 DB's sister was indecently assaulted by an acquaintance of the father, a man the Department came to learn was a known sex offender. DB saw it happen and gave a statement to police. The Department's own record of the incident, one officer conceded at trial, was not merely thin but wrong. The Department and the Director General decided not to report it to police, which cut against the departmental policy described in evidence at trial.

On 27 September 1990, with all of it on file, the Director General accepted a recommendation that wardship was no longer needed and that the father was the right person to raise them. That decision, Judge Black wrote at paragraph 206, "is utterly impossible to understand, even allowing for the considerable benefit of hindsight."

The wardship lapsed on 5 December 1990. DB told the court he found out when his father collected him from the Bunbury welfare office and told him he was not welfare anymore. Nobody gave him a number to call. He had no phone and no coins for a payphone.

The claim against the Ministerial Body failed. At paragraph 453 the judge found it was neither the employer nor the holder of any duty to DB.

THE NAME ON THE MEMO

One of the officers recorded in the departmental paperwork now sits in the Cook Government's Cabinet.

Paragraph 98 records that the 20 December 1988 case conference was attended by "Mr Donald Punch in an acting supervisor capacity" and by a child protection worker, Mr Csillag. Don Punch is the Member for Bunbury and holds the Aboriginal Affairs, Water, Climate Resilience and South West portfolios. In 1988 he was a social worker in the Department for Community Services.

The judge attached a caveat to his name in the same paragraph, and it governs everything that follows. Mr Punch was not called as a witness. What the judgment says about his involvement comes from other people's evidence and from the documents, not from him. He was never a party, never cross examined, never asked to account for anything.

Read with that caveat, the record runs like this. Mr Csillag gave evidence, which the judge found consistent with the contemporaneous file notes, that the reunification goal was one he and Mr Punch agreed to (paragraph 100). At paragraph 110 the plan put up to the Director General is described as coming from the two of them, allowing the children home in what Mr Csillag called a structured therapeutic way.

Paragraph 107 deals with a particular oversight. Part of the plan had the children staying for a time with a couple the judgment calls Mr and Mrs BR. Sitting in the Department's own file was an allegation that Mr BR had sexually abused the children's mother years earlier. Mr Csillag said neither he nor, as far as he knew, Mr Punch spotted it. Neither did the Director General. Had anyone spotted it, Mr Csillag agreed, that placement would never have been recommended. The step meant to keep the children safe, the judge observed, was nothing of the kind.

Mr Punch's name surfaces again in 1990. A file note about the father's unsuitability as a carer went to him (paragraph 204). He is listed among several departmental staff involved in the recommendation process that followed (paragraph 207). On 19 November 1990 the social worker Marija Radich faxed him about the father's drinking, the parties, the unpaid rent, the inconsistent explanations he was giving staff, and the assault on DB's sister (paragraph 212).

The next day Mr Csillag swore an affidavit supporting the father getting custody. Not one of the concerns in that fax appears in it, the judge notes at paragraph 216. Mr Punch was at a meeting the following day where the Department's worries about the father were talked through (paragraph 217). Nothing changed as a result.

No finding was made against him. Mr Punch is named in ten paragraphs of a 124 page judgment, all of them setting out the narrative or summarising what witnesses said. The findings of negligence, breach and absence of good faith run against the Director General, with the State carrying the liability. Nothing in the judgment says Mr Punch was personally negligent or that he did anything improper, and there is no adverse finding about his credibility, which would have been difficult given he did not give evidence.

The judgment does point upwards, though. Paragraph 104 describes Mr Csillag as young and junior at the time and says the decisions were not his to make. Where the focus should lie, the judge wrote, is on the people who supervised him and on the Director General as guardian. She did not say who those supervisors were.

Nick Goiran, who leads the Opposition in the Legislative Council, moved a motion in September 2025 drawing the house's attention to the judgment and to Mr Punch's involvement. What is said in Parliament is protected by privilege and is not a finding of any court. WA in Focus has put questions to Mr Punch and will publish whatever he says in full.

IT WAS NOT REASONABLE

The decisions that harmed DB were made in 1988 and 1990. The decision to fight him was made in 2024.

Judge Black handed down a separate ruling on costs on 28 November 2025. DB had made a formal offer to settle on 4 June 2024. The State knocked it back. He then did better at trial than the offer he had made.

Under the District Court Rules that normally means the State pays his legal costs on the higher indemnity basis from the day it refused. The State asked the court to make a different order. Its argument was that it had been caught out, because DB described abuse at trial going beyond what the papers had suggested, including a statement he gave police in 1991 when he was twelve.

The judge would not have it. It should have been obvious to the State and its lawyers, she wrote at paragraph 26 of the costs ruling, that a boy of twelve in State care was unlikely to tell police everything sexual that had been done to him. The defendants had paid too little regard to something long since documented, she said at paragraph 27: that abused children often disclose late, in pieces, or never at all.

She pointed to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which found survivors take 23.9 years on average to tell anyone, and men about five years longer than women.

"I reject the defendants' submission that they were reasonably taken by surprise," she wrote at paragraph 32. "If they were taken by surprise, it was not reasonable." She was particularly conscious, she added, that this defendant was the State, which of all defendants ought to understand what it costs a child to tell that story.

She awarded indemnity costs from 4 June 2024. She also refused the Ministerial Body any costs at all despite DB losing against it, noting at paragraph 39 that he had only sued both because the law is unclear about which arm of the State carries liability of this kind.

The Royal Commission handed down its findings in 2017. The offer was refused seven years later.

NOT YET ON THE RECORD

Whether the judgment is under appeal is unclear. Neither the September judgment nor the November costs ruling mentions one.

Nor is it known who signed off on the litigation strategy. Someone approved running the argument that a survivor's staged disclosure amounted to unfair surprise, in 2024 and again at trial in 2025. Whether any minister was briefed on it is not public.

The Department of Communities has published nothing identifying what it changed as a result of the case. What stops a child today being sent back to someone a court has found sexually abused them is not set out anywhere the public can read it.

NOTED DISCREPANCY

The damages table at paragraph 794 leaves out a head of damage: past loss of superannuation of $97,045, which the judge allowed at paragraph 739 and which is included in the subtotal printed above it. The final figure of $2,846,960.69 is accurate.

DISCLAIMER

DB is a pseudonym. This article does not set out the detail of what was done to him beyond what is needed to explain the court's findings.

1800 RESPECT

If this raises anything for you, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) offers confidential counselling for people affected by sexual assault.