Child fostering services should be backed up by structures that offer support for natural parents to try to keep families together when possible, according to the chairman of the Malta Social Workers Association, Anthea Agius.
Appoġġ Agency's children services manager Ruth Sciberras agreed on the need for such services in the community aimed at helping parents remain with their children.
She added that, alongside the ongoing fostering campaign, the agency would next month roll one out related to positive parenting.
This campaign will provide parents with practical tips and information about how to act with their children in certain scenarios.
The Children's Commissioner's annual report, issued last week, highlighted a pressing need to set up a system that allowed children to be fostered, irrespective of their parents' wishes, if fostering was deemed to be in the child's best interest by social workers.
As things stand, social work practice requires parental consent for children living in institutions to be fostered.
"Social work has a key role to play here, possibly more than any other profession, because it involves mediating between conflicting rights: the right of the child to be brought up in a family environment and the rights of the parents," Ms Agius said.
"While one may argue that parents who fail to protect their children lose their rights over them, by offering support and rehabilitation to families, those families can offer care for their own children who, in turn, long for their parents' love and care," she said.
Ms Agius pointed out that the services addressed problems the families of these children faced and "we risk not giving the natural family a real chance".
Having said that, she added, in cases where families refused help or could not improve their prospects for reunification, it was unfair to deprive a child of a family environment such as that offered by fostering and adoption. In these cases, Ms Agius said, the association agreed with the Children's Commissioner's proposal to allow fostering irrespective of the parents' wishes, especially where children under five years were concerned.
However, she said, the reality was that foster families were not always available or ready to take in particular children, such as teenagers.
While the promotion of fostering was a very good initiative, this had to be backed up by professionally-run residential care and services that addressed perpetrators.
"We have a good experience with services for perpetrators of domestic violence. However, for perpetrators of child abuse we still need to develop a service... I'm sure many parents would be willing to do this voluntarily while, with others, we may need the intervention of the law. The benefits of such services would, together with fostering, be far reaching to children, families and society at large," Ms Agius said.