Phoenix Sinclair Inquiry

The inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair is starting to open up some distressingly familiar themes in the world of social work.

What we are beginning to hear about include high caseloads, demanding work schedules, frequent turnover of staff, a child not seen, a case that appears to have relied heavily on self report by the family and social workers who didn't build enough of a relationship with the family to really know what was occurring. For many of the social workers who have testified at the inquiry, this case was not so severe when compared to others they were trying to manage.

For Justice Ted Hughes, an experienced commissioner in child protection inquiries, the task in front of him will be to look beyond the obvious concerns - social workers who didn't get the job done - to the very broad issue of the systemic issues that made it impossible to do the work needed to protect this vulnerable child ---- and many others like her.

Justice Hughes will need to think about the poverty; the intergenerational problems in Canada's Aboriginal Communities (strongly linked to the story of Residential Schools in Canada) and the failure to properly fund child protection. The Phoenix Sinclair case can too easily be framed as a failure of individual social workers. That is easy. They become the convenient scapegoat. Hughes should look at how we fund child protection; how we fund prevention services; how we address real healing and - most of all - whether we in Canada want an effective child protection system or do we want the feel good of having one but not spending too much on it. It is a deep moral question.

I fear that Canada, like many Western countries, are not prepared to pay what real child protection and prevention would cost.

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.

Justice Hughes has ruled on the Phoenix Sinclair Inquiry

Justice Ted Hughes has now ruled that the public inquiry should be fully public indeed. This means that all witnesses, including social workers, will have their testimony publicly available.  A good summary of his lengthy ruling is offered by The Winnipeg Free Press

Should social workers at the Phoenix Sinclair Inquiry have anonymity

Justice Ted Hughes has been asked to conduct a public inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair. She died in 2005 when social workers took her out of her foster home and placed her back with her mother. According to  Canada.com:

According to evidence in the first-degree murder trial that led to life sentences for her mother, Samantha Kematch and her stepdad, Karl McKay, Phoenix was frequently confined, shot with a BB gun and forced to eat her own vomit. 

We have seen how social workers who appear to have made mistakes in a child protection case can be vilified in the media. Those involved in the management of the Baby Peter case in England were dragged through the press and scapegoated and judged harshly by the media.

In the case of the Matthew Vaudreuil case in British Columbia, social workers felt targeted by the Gove Inquiry. Some may have suffered for years from the experience.

Too bad critics might say. They might argue that if you fail in your job, then the public has the right to know. Yet, social workers are often trying to manage case loads that are too high; cases that are very complex; resources and budgets that are limited and political agendas that children should be reunited with family as often as possible (the family preservation agenda).  A child kept away from family unnecessarily is a tragedy - a child returned and killed is one also.

RCMP officers in the Robert Dziekanski case in Vancouver (when he was killed by a Taser incident) were not granted anonymity before they were found culpable.

The majority of professionals who make mistakes in their work are not dragged into the media. Public inquiries might be a different kettle of fish because government has purposely set up a process for the public to find out what went wrong.

There are many examples of public inquiries where the names of social workers have been made public and many where they have not. The argument in favour is that the public have the right to know - but do they need to know the who? What perhaps they really have the right to know is what happened.

The goal of a good inquiry is not retribution. Rather it is an attempt to find ways to avoid repetition. Good inquiry seeks to understand but to get there, participants need the freedom to really talk about what happened and why. If the participants fear the consequences, then open discussion is unlikely . Rather, protection of self becomes the goal.

Justice Hughes must decided how best the truth will come out.