Entirely inadequate

Where are the answers? Despite occasional protestations that it is committed to transparency and accountability, the Children’s Aid Society of Prince Edward remains steadfastly silent about how and why it put nine and 10-yearold children in the home of a man it had reason to believe was a sexual predator.

Now the local CAS says it will partner with another agency. It doesn’t say which agency? What terms? What will happen to the Picton office? It says only that it wants enter a partnership to “to ensure the best possible service and support to the children and families of this community.” If so, why didn’t they take the deal to merge with Hastings and Northumberland a year ago? What circumstances have changed?

Of course we know the answer to that question. In the interim was a high profile trial of a 71-year-old man accused and ultimately convicted of sexually abusing children placed in his care by the local CAS. That trial brought out into the open the terrible possibility that this man likely approached the CAS with the intent of preying on children. It revealed that many warning signs were overlooked —including accusations of wrongdoing in the home years earlier.

In 2006 the local CAS removed foster children from the home while police investigated accusations by two young children that they had been sexually abused by the man while in his care. The accusers were children. The accused was a skilled manipulator. A conviction likely unachievable, the charges were dropped.

But then the most heartbreaking and certainly most shameful thing happened. The local CAS decided, absent a conviction, that other foster children could be put in this man’s hands. At least a dozen more children — young boys and girls— were sent to live in this man’s home.

It would take another five years, and fresh charges of sexual abuse of children in his care, before the CAS finally acted to remove kids from the home permanently. In the meantime young lives were horrifically damaged—the scars to endure a lifetime.

The 71-year-old man was convicted of his crimes and sentenced to nine years in prison. He is currently out on bail seeking to appeal his conviction.

The Prince Edward County CAS has never explained how this happened. Never accounted for its role in this tragedy.

Where were the safeguards and protections? Where was the monitoring and scrutiny? Are there other cases that just haven’t surfaced yet? Are the children in the County CAS’s care safe? And how do we know?

This tragedy cries out for some answers. Yet the best the local CAS can offer is that it has reviewed its own process and made improvements.

Surely when the state, acting presumably in the best interests of children, decides it must remove a child from his or her home, it has a solemn duty to ensure that the child is kept safely. But that didn’t happen. This agency failed utterly and completely. And we need to know why. So that it never happens again.

Sadly it wasn’t the first instance of failed oversight by this agency that ended badly.

A year ago Judge Geoff Griffin, sentencing Joe and Janet Holm for the sexual abuse of children in their care, urged this community to demand an inquiry into what happened. A year later, those questions have not yet been answered. Only more questions and more tragedies have surfaced.

Now the local CAS looks ready to disappear into the puffy arms of a much larger regional bureaucracy. How will this community get answers if the board disappears? Or the executive director fades into a comfortable pension?

Who will be accountable for these failures?

We are being asked to look the other way as the provincial ministry and its operatives attempt to sweep this entire sordid mess under the rug. These folks are counting on our submissiveness—our willingness to look the other way.

They use words like accountability and transparency as though they are sincere—yet their actions prove them to be as cynical, calculating and manipulative as the predator they facilitated.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca