Duty of care

Last week, a 15-year-old girl in Winnipeg was removed from life support after being sexually assaulted and severely beaten. A boy the same age is in custody. Both are wards of Manitoba’s Child and Family Services, a similar agency to Ontario’s Children’s Aid Society.

The children were living in a hotel in Winnipeg when the assault occurred. According to CFS, placements for foster and group homes can’t meet demand. Hotels were used as a last resort, but all wards will be removed by June 1. In a video raising awareness about homeless people in Toronto, a girl relates her story of horrific abuse by her mother, being taken from her, running away from a group home and ending up on the streets.

For over a century, Canadian society has agreed to remove children from situations where they are in danger of abuse or neglect. Child welfare groups across the country oversee complaints and investigations. They work with families to keep children from harm. When remediation fails, the child is removed from the situation.

Highland Shores CAS has over 400 kids in care, and that’s an improvement, they report.

But when a child is being taken from a home in which a parent cannot or will not care for them properly, it becomes the government’s responsibility to do what the parents could not. Implicitly, we all accept that.

There are wonderful people who step up, volunteer as foster parents, as big brothers and sisters, and guide children from bad situations into sunnier futures. But these people are too rare, and it has put those kids who need our support in a dire situation.

The statistics are not pretty. Crown wards are more likely to die than those in the care of their parents. They are more likely to commit suicide. They are more likely to run away. They are more likely to be put in jail. They are not bad kids, but there’s a stigma—we don’t expect them to be good.

In itself, being removed from a parent brings a range of negative emotions with it: fear, anger, rejection. Combine that with a past of neglect or violence or mental illness and an uncertain future, and you have a recipe for disaster.

More than 400 kilometres north of Winnipeg, the band elders at the Misipawistik Cree Nation started asking a very good question: if the parents have done wrong to the children, why are the children being taken away? That, the elders decided, is victimizing a new generation, and allowing a bad cycle to continue. Instead, they changed the rules. Now if the family must be separated, it’s the parents who are removed.

This is a great experiment. It hasn’t been tried and there’s no way to know if it will work. But the data on current practices is dismal.

In Winnipeg, both the perpetrator and the victim were children. We don’t why they were crown wards, but we do know their living situation was unstable. They likely had very little adult guidance, and limited access to their own parents. Clearly, something has to change.

mihal@mihalzada.com