Topic
Love The Tyee? We need your support. Become a Tyee Builder for as little as $5/month.
Like Tasered 11-year-old, too many troubled children are policed, not treated.
Foster care kids are 'held to account' while those who put them at risk are ignored.
Why go overseas to adopt? The risks in BC are overblown.
Two years ago, when I heard the news that an 11-year-old boy living in a group home in Prince George had been Tasered by police, I remember asking myself: "How could that possibility happen?" Last week, B.C.'s Representative for Children and Youth answered that question with agonizing clarity in her latest report: "Who Protected Him? How B.C.'s Child Welfare System Failed One of Its Most Vulnerable Children."
The story of this young boy is an extreme example of an all too common trajectory for many of this province's poorest and most marginalized young people who move quickly from being labeled vulnerable child, to troubled youth, to dangerous criminal.
More children and youth in care in B.C. become involved with the youth criminal justice system than graduate from high school. One in six youth in care had been in youth custody (lock up, remand or sentenced) compared to less than one in 50 of the general population of their age peers. Like the boy who is the subject of the Representative's report, nearly one-third of the youth in the youth justice system are Aboriginal, and this over-representation is replicated in the adult prison system as well.
Many of these youth, like the boy who was the subject of the report, begin life facing significant disadvantages including poverty, physical disability, and parents who themselves have been let down by the child welfare system as young people. His story is one of disrupted attachment, including 15 different foster and group home placements by the time he was 12, unmet medical and educational needs, and punitive responses to behaviours beyond his control. While the incident that prompted the report was unusual, many of the challenges he faced were not.
As the impacts of disadvantage and trauma compounded, this young child was increasingly institutionalized. By age eight, a psychologist has concluded that he could no long remain in regular foster care as a result of his "reactive attachment disorder", and he was placed in a group home designed for housing street and criminal justice system involved teens. One of the professionals quoted in the representative's report described group homes as "warehousing children until they aged out of the system."
Calling the police
It was also at the age of eight, soon after moving to a staffed "residential resource," that staff began to rely on the police to manage this child's behaviour. Although he was too young for the Youth Criminal Justice Act to apply, police were called during outbursts, or after particularly inappropriate behaviours, often transporting him to hospital where he was given extensive medication. This practice does not seem to be limited to British Columbia. In Ontario, the Office of Child and Family Service Advocacy found that there was a pattern emerging where youth are being brought into care and then being criminally charged for their behaviour. The OCFSA found that group homes rely heavily on the police to handle day-to-day behavioural issues that would come up in family homes, noting: "Kids have been charged for everything from refusing to read a book, or hitting someone with a tea towel."
One of the most troubling aspects of all criminalization of young people in the foster care system is the extent to which they are "held to account" for their behaviour, while those who harm them and put them at risk are ignored. One social worker reported to the representative that she believed the child was locked in a shed for undeterminable periods of time and forced to take cold showers as punishment. Both his biological family and many community members complained. While the foster home was eventually closed, no police report was ever made, and no criminal or civil charges were ever laid.
A life in prison
In reading this report it is striking how much the conditions facing this young boy in foster care mirror the conditions facing adults in our prison population. From his earliest experiences in the foster care system this young boy faced overcrowded conditions, suffered from lack of attention to health, and faced violence from his paid caregivers as well as from others around him. The representative even condemns the use of "safe rooms" to isolate the boy, in a practice eerily similar to prisoners being placed in segregation for bad behaviour. In many ways it feels like this boy has already been in prison his whole life.
This young child, at least at the time of this report, had not officially entered the youth criminal justice system, but many more like him make that transition every year. While it is easy for politicians to talk about getting tough on crime, it is much harder for government to talk about the failures of a child welfare system. Rarely do we get the chance to read such a thorough review of how difficult life can be for the most marginalized members of our society, and rarely has the government looked so ineffective in providing the type of care that would break the cycle of protection to prison. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Read more: Rights + Justice, BC Politics,
14
Login or register to post comments
Hakuin
17 weeks ago
If Canadians
[OFFENSIVE COMMENT REMOVED. -MODERATOR.]
Perry
17 weeks ago
This is Canada's version of
This is Canada's version of the US school-to-prison pipeline. With Harper continuing the U.S. style war on citizens who use certain drugs, its just a matter of time before the horrors described in the article below become reality here, since reason, sanity and evidence no longer inform drug policy.
"Full-Body Pat-Downs in America's Schools: How the War on Drugs Is a War on Children"
Criminalizing children will have constitutional implications for generations to come.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/full-body-pat-downs-americas-schools-how-war-drugs-war-children
excerpt:
"Best publicized, perhaps, is the plight of young people in Meridian, Mississippi, where a federal investigation is probing into why children as young as 10 are routinely taken to jail for wearing the wrong color socks or flatulence in class. Bob Herbert wrote of a situation in Florida in 2007, where police found themselves faced with the great challenge of placing a 6-year-old girl in handcuffs too big for her wrists. The child was being arrested for throwing a tantrum in her kindergarten class; the solution was to cuff her biceps, after which she was dragged to the precinct house for mug shots and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.
In New York City, kids who make trouble are routinely removed from school altogether and placed in suspension centers, holding cells or juvenile detention lockups. In the old days, you got a detention slip for scrawling your initials on a desk. Now a student can be given a summons by a school police officer. If the kid loses it or doesn’t want to tell his parents, it becomes a warrant—and a basis for arrest.
"According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, some 77 percent of New York’s school police interventions are for noncriminal matters like having food outside the cafeteria, having a cellphone or being late. Other minor offenses like shouting, getting into petty scuffles or being on school grounds after hours fall into the category of “disruptive behavior”—an offense that can get a student suspended. Just 4 percent of police interventions are in response to “major crimes against persons.”"
...
The most vulnerable targets may be children of color, but this war on kids is a war on all children. Ultimately, the lack of due-process protections and human dignity in ghetto schools leaches into suburban schools. It doesn’t really matter whether one side views it as protecting against the dark side with zero-tolerance strip searches for ibuprofen, while the other side experiences it as an annexing of the prison-industrial complex onto daily life. Criminalizing children will have constitutional implications for generations to come. It is corrosive and rends the fabric of our erstwhile civil society, makes a lie of equal opportunity, and rewards authoritarian personality disorder at the expense of our humanity. ...
FatherTheo
17 weeks ago
Failed parenting by the state.
If the institutions in charge of child welfare in this country were held to the same level of accountability as the parents and families they strip these families from, they'd lose custody too. Child welfare is abusive, and creates the problems that abuse does. This is especially true for Aboriginal children. Children who have been subject to sexual, physical and emotional abuse turn out badly, as you might expect. Aboriginal children need only to be placed in the child welfare system to turn out equally as badly. That makes the child welfare system a form of abuse.
C2C
16 weeks ago
Vulnerable Kids
There are private companies running these group homes, and overseeing the foster homes. They make a profit. We pay them rather than properly support the original families. Even worse, when these kids do age out, there are no services at all for them, whether or not they've had any legal profits. Have Autism and grew up with services? Tough luck when you're 18. Have an IQ over 70? No Community Living Support for you. They ended up homeless, and become the targets of derision from those who think they're just lazy. Drives me crazy, I hate the whole system.
zalm
16 weeks ago
I dunno
Some of these same kids eventually end up at Children's Hospital in the Mental Health unit where they routinely assault staff, visitors and each other. Not one of them is ever charged, not one of them is given anything more than the standard lecture "that's not an appropriate way to handle your feelings - come over here and let's talk about your feelings." Meanwhile a blindsided nurse is treating her broken jaw, another his bitten forearm, and another patient is picking splinters of glass out of her hair and clothing. Staff in psych wards get hundreds of injuries a year there and have the highest rate of WCB claims and sick time of any nurses in the system, including ones at the needle exchanges and street programs.
I'm tired of the generalizing that goes on in these cases. For every kid who ends up in jail as a result of a miserable upbringing, there are dozens who develop the coping strategies that we all do to make reasonable lives for themselves. Only you rarely hear about them, because they aren't newsworthy. And when you DO hear about them, you find out that the same system everybody is so busy castigating is the one that helped them the most, more than all the foster parents and social workers and cops ever did.
Having been called more times than I can count from my worksite to help restrain yet another patient (of any age) or repair the damage done by acting out, I think I'm as expert as any other care staff in a hospital to determine when someone is genuinely fearful, confused, disoriented and lashing out; and when someone is simply exercising power, malevolently acting out in narcissistic patterns, or lashing out to destroy property and hurt people simply because they're bored... or they can.
As Darcie Bennett says herself in the article this example above is an "extreme example". Anyone who generalizes about "the system" based on this example is talking nonsense.
Hakuin
16 weeks ago
Mebbe some kids DO just need
A kick in the ass to understand hurting others hurts. But how can we tell?
Who decides?
And who interprets "kick in the ass"? :
http://www.vancouversun.com/Video+Disturbing+Ashley+Smith+prison+video+shown+coroner+inquest/7483832/story.html
Perry
16 weeks ago
zalm, your argument reminds
zalm, your argument reminds me of the Indian Residential School system. Some children exposed to that cruel system did have a good experience, got educated without being abused, liked the staff, etc. But far too many children were tortured, assaulted, raped, psychologically and spiritually abused, neglected to death, etc. Would you really argue on the basis that some kids were helped that that means the system was a good one?
That's how I see the child welfare system. For far too many children it is an abusive system. As FatherTheo points out, when the state is the 'parent' the state gets away with child crimes that the natural parents would be jailed for.
zalm
16 weeks ago
yes, yes, yes
...but how do you know?
"That's how I see the child welfare system. For far too many children it is an abusive system."
But how do you know it's "far too many"? Is it one? Ten? A thousand? How many are on the other side? Two? Ten? A thousand?
Until you know these answers, you'd better stop generalizing, because you're just adding to the noise.
Hakuin
16 weeks ago
So why don't
We know these answers?
zalm
16 weeks ago
Hakky
Don't imagine for a minute that I'm suggesting ass-kicking - I'm not. It's too difficult to determine how to do it effectively rather than hurtfully. But by the same token, criminal charges are absolutely the wrong thing to do too - too much time passes between action and punishment, the punishment is usually not proportional to the deed, and the system drives you crazy trying to understand it while it's working. Most people'[s justification mechanism sets in one to ten seconds after a deed. Expecting a judge's verdict to reset this clock 18 months later is Tinkerbell thinking.
I read as little as possible of Blatchford - I can't stand her judgmental attitude and narrow point of view. But I did catch a couple of the articles dealing with the prison guards who were hung out to dry, and what I notice is that nearly every one of them was caught up trying to apply a system that was poorly understood at best, rather than using their own judgment.
And that's what I'm talking about. In extreme cases, our judgment is pretty good. Where we disagree is how to handle it once it's gotten to that stage. And hopefully Bennett will answer that in her next article
retsof
16 weeks ago
you pay now or you pay later,
you pay now or you pay later, but you pay. What the government has not figured out is, it is less expensive to pay now than to pay later. Had the 11 yr. old been provided good care as an infant, most of this would not have happened.
The 11 yr. might wind up in jail but the foster parents get a pass. The ministry and its representatives get a pass. There is something criminal about that. The ministry and its representatives, in my opinion, are guilty of child abuse and neglect and the ministers responsible ought to be charged. It might fix the mess a tad sooner if some of the ministers had to go to jail, along with the workers who turned a blind eye to the conditions the child lived under.
There is the issue of health care workers being assaulted by these children and that needs to be dealt with. Sending the kid to jail just isn't one of those things. Sufficient qualified staff might help. Most of these children need one on one care. It isn't available because the government would rather spend money on a new stadium roof.
There is a failure to accept responsibility and the police are becoming the front line mental health workers, not a good thing.
Perry
16 weeks ago
zalm, I think you are being a
zalm, I think you are being a little disingenuous. In your first comment above you wrote:
"As Darcie Bennett says herself in the article this example above is an "extreme example". Anyone who generalizes about "the system" based on this example is talking nonsense."
You only cite one part of Darcie's sentence, which reads in full:
"The story of this young boy is an extreme example of an all too common trajectory for many of this province's poorest and most marginalized young people who move quickly from being labeled vulnerable child, to troubled youth, to dangerous criminal."
You left out the context in order to make your point, but when I read that full quotation I see that while that one example is an extreme one, Darcie goes on to say that what happened to that child is a common trajectory. In other words, there is a systemic problem effecting many others, which you seem to be dismissing outright.
As far as your disgusting numbers game goes, I think one abused child in the system is one too many. If you don't know the actual numbers either, why are your comments not merely adding to the noise as you say mine are? It sounds to me like you are noisely defending child abusers, and telling me to shut up about the issue.
Hakuin
16 weeks ago
ehhhhhh! I wouldn't go THAT far Perry
It just sounds to me like Zalm is one of many frustrated if not downright maddened by a system that spends no money if it sees no financial profit.
Perry
16 weeks ago
Yeah, but I didn't accuse him
Yeah, but I didn't accuse him of that, only said it "sounds to me like". Maybe my hearing is bad.