Looking at the Sixties Sxoop

The Sixties Scoop has come to represent the transition from Residential Schools as a means of controlling and disrupting Aboriginal families, communities and cultures across Canada. Indeed, Cindy Blackstock of the First People's Child and Family Caring Society has termed child welfare as the new Residential school.

An MRU journalism student sought to have a look at the Sixties Scoop and offer some insights into what that period was and profiles two people who were impacted by it. The blog can be found here.

In another relevant report, I have been part of a group that has been looking at how First Nations parents are assessed in the child welfare system. The report, Nistawatsimin: Exploring First Nations Parenting: A Literature Review and Expert Consultation with Blackfoot Elders:

This report provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the scholarship that encompasses relevant topics surrounding the theme of Aboriginal parenting. It seeks to contribute to a larger conversation about the relationship between child protection services (CPS) and Aboriginal peoples. The focus is on how parents are considered and assessed by CPS. In this report, the authors raise the notion that the foundations of assessment have not been rooted in Aboriginal cultural and their world view of family and parenting.

It is one step in challenging how child protection looks at First Nations parents. It is rooted in a Blackfoot view and thus the work requires extension and adaptation to other Aboriginal cultures. But it is a place to start.

BC Child welfare system broken?

The Representative for Child and Youth in British Columbia, Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, suggests that the child welfare system in her province is broken. She made the comments in a report presented by the ATPN media. One issue that she raises is that, for Aboriginal children, too often funding is linked to the child being in care versus prevention efforts to keep children out of care. Turpel-Lafond has many case examples to back up her worry.

Prevention needs to address issues that child welfare is not set up to manage. Poverty is the main reason that Aboriginal children are in care. Child welfare cannot solve that. They can only respond to the effects of poverty which are typically seen in the form of neglect.

As a new federal government takes shape in Canada, now is the time for at least three core  Aboriginal child welfare issues to be tackled:

1. Start fully funding child welfare on reserves across this country;
2. Implement prevention programs to keep children out of care; and
3. When it is necessary to provide protection to child keep the child within the community and family system by providing needed supports for kinship care to be successful.

In my view, these are priorities. We should be getting them on to the agenda of this new government.

To view the ATPN report, go here.

The British Columbia Representative for Children and Youth Nails it Again

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is the Representative for Children and Youth in British Columbia. She has just issued a report, The Thin Front Line that analyzes staffing and related problems in the province's child welfare system. It's a read that is relevant to child protection authorities across Canada and likely elsewhere.

She states that "The problems are systemic and have accumulated over time, worsening and not improving." She adds that the complexities of working in child protection have increased over time but there are fewer workers to manage these caseloads. This should sound familiar in many places.  She notes that workers have had to struggle with budgetary cuts, staff shortages, high turnover and pressure to meet strict timelines.

The government of B.C. says she is working with old data. Perhaps so, but the issues that Turpel-Lafond raises are hardly new. Thus, there may be some improvement but one doubts that the picture is much out of focus given what is seen in scrutiny of child protection throughout the Western world. Indeed, her themes very much mirror my own research on child protection errors. Her conclusions also strongly mirror reviews done by many authors.

Where she gets the story quite straight is in her major themes:

• Workloads are high and complex;
• Processes change and are not necessarily clinically focused;
• The issues that must be dealt with are often connected to long standing inequities that may be beyond the capacity of a worker to solve. An example is the legacy of the Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop which decimated the parenting and family structure in Canada's First Nations communities;
• Bureaucracy is a burden that takes many hours away from clinical work;
• It's tough work so people leave and it's hard to get replacements quickly;
• The geography of Canada (in this case B.C.) means that many rural and remote communities get spotty services;
• Clinical supervision is required regularly but there are not enough supervisors to manage the needs;
• She found too many offices operating in crisis mode which tends to lead to "band aid" social work, as she put it.

Turpel-Lafond offers several recommendations which include:

• Sufficient budgets to address the staffing and workload issues;
• Improve the management systems to reflect the complexity and volume of cases;
• Track performance and respond to gaps or poor results;
• Get more First Nations workers in place.

She notes that there have been some positive steps such as the introduction of the Family Development Response to help support families with lower intensity issues. 

These are not new issues so perhaps the one question she did not ask that needs asking is "Why do these issues keep happening, time and again, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?" In other words, we are consistently getting it wrong. So how can it be done better. Public reviews need to start talking about that versus repeating themes and recommendations we have seen so often --- or is that governments are not really committed to child protection beyond the band aids? Is that governments don't really want to tackle the complex socio-economic factors that lead to children being at risk - poverty, inter-generational trauma, mental health and addictions and so on?

Phoenix Sinclair Inquiry

While there is much evidence yet to come in the Manitoba Inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, one piece of it that emerged last week has an all too familiar ring to it. It is one that we have heard in so many of these inquiries in various countries - case loads that were too high. In this case, the social worker who was testifying spoke of initially having 40 cases to manage - an impossible number.

However, the worker goes on to explain that more than the case number, is the number of children being managed. She described that you could cut the caseload in half but still face over whelming demands with families that have high numbers of children.

Maybe it is not the number of cases that should be considered but the number of children that should be the gauge of what is too many.

Yet two fundamental problems would persist - 1. not enough social workers are being drawn into child protection work and 2. retaining those that are is challenging with high caseloads, complex needs and limited resources with which to work.

One hopes that as Justice Hughes works his way through this inquiry that he will look at some of the core issues facing child protection and social work. There will be more to think about as the evidence unfolds.

Liability Chill in child protection

The notion of liability chill is not unknown in various endeavours. Essentially, an enterprise begins to behave in a protective fashion to protect itself from liability claims. Often, this can mean conservative practices. In child protection, it can mean an increase in children being brought into care. It can also mean a risk aversive approach to clinical practice. Rather than take a reasonable chance on a parent or family reunification, it can lead to being more intrusive or taking longer to consider the possibility of return to parental care.

Two unrelated cases - one on the USA and one in the UK - may well lead to liability chill but, if looked at for the clinical lessons that both offer - should not lead there at all. Yet, both cases can scare social workers.

In the first case in North Carolina (the case of Aubery Kina-Marie Littlejohn), the child protection agency and social workers are being sued for the failure to protect a 15 month child from the fatal abuse of a parent. The Republic notes that:

The new complaint filed in Swain County Superior Court names the county DSS as a defendant along with seven current and former social workers, including the former head of the agency, Tammy Cagle. 

The lawsuit goes a bot further and raises an issue that is resonate across North America, Australia and New Zealand - the nature of child protection involvement with Aboriginal populations. In this case, the allegation is that not enough is being done to protect children within these populations. This is a dangerous approach - on the one hand, children regardless of where they live deserve a vibrant and effective child protection service. Thus, no part of society should receive less service. Yet, there is the real concern that child protection might target populations deemed less able to care for their children (see the prior post on racial bias). The Aboriginal populations have received racially based interventions. Care must be taken to not return to those ways. If this case were to succeed, it has the potential to raise the idea that Aboriginal populations may need targeted services. They do not need to be ignored but neither do they need to be singled out.

The second case in the UK has seen a social worker, David Alexander Fry, struck off as a registered social worker. He was found to have failed in many areas of practice. What is worrisome is that the General Social Care Council (GSCC) felt that it was the social worker's job to raise concerns that his case load was too high to manage. Perhaps so, but where was the responsibility of the management to effectively supervise the worker and manage the volume of cases assigned.

This is not to take away from the rather serious clinical failings of the worker. As CommunityCare.co.uk reports:

He also had a number of different team managers and received supervision only three times during that five-month period...“If the registrant was unable to keep up with his workload and record keeping, he should have done more to bring that to the attention of his managers, even allowing for the fact that those managers were constantly changing,” the committee said.

 That is bad management. A worker might well start to take cover and try to protect themselves in such a situation. Sure, good case management does that but so does "C.Y.A." case management. Clients suffer when that occurs. It is one thing to hold the worker accountable for poor social work - but do the same for poor supervision and management.

All of this is not to say that social workers should not be held accountable - like any profession they should be - but care should be taken to ensure that the liability is for the right thing.

Judge John Riley and his controversial views on aboriginal justice

I have just read a fascinating article from Australia from Carole Zufferey on the nature of privilege that inherently exists for social workers who are white. She reflects on her own career and concludes:

This is a beginning attempt to reflect on my own white power and privilege in my role as a professional social worker in a statutory context that intervenes in the protection of children, which included removing children from their families as a result of abuse or neglect.

In Australia, the child protection system engaged in gathering up aboriginal children in large numbers. She describes:

Furthermore, Aboriginal protectionist and assimilation legislation and policies were enacted in state jurisdictions, commencing with the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act 1869. These policies resulted in the systematic removal of up to 100,000 Aboriginal children from their families into public institutions and missions across Australia, up until the 1970s, creating what is now referred to as the Stolen Generations.

In Canada, we had a similar program which came to be known as the Sixties Scoop. This resulted in large numbers of children being removed from aboriginal homes and then placed into the homes of white families. Even today, aboriginal children are dramatically over represented in child welfare systems in Canada.

In a recent talk, former Judge John Reilly raises the notion that we may simply have it wrong when we think about social justice and crime. Speaking in Calgary, he puts forward his ideas which can be seen via YouTube from his TedxCalgary presentation. You can see it at

Judge John Reilly speaking at TedxCalgary


Reference:

Zufferey, C. (2012). 'Not knowing that I do not know and not wanting to know: Reflections of a white Australian social worker. International Social Work, In Press.