Child protection as racist and poverty driven

It is perhaps somewhat odd that two Canadian newspapers would chose to write articles on the child protection system in the same week.  Looking at several inquiries, The National Post calls for reform of the system They start by noting that there will be an inquiry starting in Ontario in early 2015 on the death of Katelyn Sampson. She was murdered in 2008. The Toronto Star noted:

When Irving told the Children’s Aid Society on March 30, 2008, that she did not think she could provide for Katelynn and wanted her out of her home, the agency “passed the buck” to the Native Child and Family Services — Irving is part First Nations — and nothing was done, McMahon stated. (When a Native Services caseworker contacted Irving 16 days later, she lied and indicated the Toronto School Board was providing support and that she wanted the file closed, which it was.)

This inquiry will add to the long list of inquiries into the failures of child protection in Canada. In my research, we have identified about 80 inquires of various natures with at least two more on the horizon.
These will add to the legacies of Matthew Vaudreuil, Phoenix Sinclair, Christian Lee, Babby Annie, Jordan Heikamp, Kim Anne Poppen, Jeffrey Baldwin and so on. The stories are children of poverty but also of the First Nations of Canada. In other words, these are stories of the marginalized in our country.

The Toronto Star is also running a series of stories into the child protection system. They see the racism looking at how Black children are severely over represented.

Last week, the Globe and Mail told the story of Eddie Snowshoe who died through the solitary confinement system that Canada runs. But hist story starts much earlier in the institutional abuse of Canada's First Nations peoples through the residential school system. There, children were systemically abused and neglected. Today, we pay for that with the long standing impact of such broad, racist based social policies. They were designed to take the Indian out of the Indian. Now, we see the impact of fragmented Aboriginal communities and families in  the child protection systems.

It is obvious that child welfare must do a better job of the day to day management of complex cases. There are practice errors that get made and need to be corrected. That is the subject of my research. But society must also be willing to face the fact that there are several issues child protection cannot solve:

• Poverty - which is too often linked to neglect - not intentional neglect but neglect from lack of resources. These are often families where parents struggle with marginal housing and limited income, most often from low wage employment. They try to do their best with what they have but that often falls short of what is needed. Society can address these issues through economic programs.
• Aboriginal child welfare - the gross over representation of First Nations children in child protection care occurs because of the Residential Schools and the legacy they created. Child Welfare cannot fix that. 
• Underfunded mental health programs that leave families vulnerable.

The list can go on but the point here is that child welfare is being asked to "fix" problems that arise from social policies that are well beyond their control. This is a conversation we must have rather than just pointing fingers at a child protection system that cannot fix it!

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.