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The Toronto Star has done a series of investigative reports on children's aid. The lead article draws extensively on the report of the Commission to Promote Sustainable Child Welfare, reported on previously by fixcas. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. Their final report is on the government website or our local copy (pdf). Given the composition of the commission, it can only suggest more money and power for children's aid societies, along with the curtailing of oversight. In its 135 pages of prose on child care, it contains no instances of the word mother and no instances of the word father. The Star article ends with many of the commission's self-serving recommendations.

The Star breaks new ground with its measurement of the level of child drugging: "Almost half [children in care] aged 5 or more are on psychotropic or behaviour-altering drugs".

Measurements by fixcas do not agree with the funding history reported by the Star. In reality Ontario has had two kinds of funding policy for children's aid: The regime of Mike Harris, in which CAS funding increased rapidly, and other governments, in which CAS funding increased more slowly. Link to charts

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Ontario’s most vulnerable children kept in the shadows

Child welfare system lacks accountability and transparency, with services for vulnerable children described as “fragmented, confused.”

By: Sandro Contenta News, Insight Laurie Monsebraaten, Social justice reporter Jim Rankin, Published on Fri Dec 12 2014

There is a child in the Ontario government’s care who has changed homes 88 times. He or she is between 10 and 15 years old.

Senior government officials describe The Case of the Incredible Number of Moves as a “totally unacceptable outlier.”

Yet they don’t know what is being done to ensure the 88th move is the child’s last. The local children’s aid society is required to have a “plan of care” for each child. Whatever it is, it’s clearly not working.

The case was noted in government-mandated surveys obtained by the Star. The reports show three other teens changing homes more than 60 times.

Getting more details on how many times children change homes while in care is a murky business. A child welfare commission appointed by the government noted in 2012 that Ontario’s 46 children’s aid societies don’t agree on how to count or record such moves.

The commission looked at two groups of children who had spent at least 36 months in care. About 20 per cent of them changed homes more than three times. The Star obtained the commission’s numbers through a freedom-of-information request.

The government, while expressing concern, has done little to ensure more stable environments for children who experience multiple moves once taken from their parents. And it has not publicized data that would flag the issue.

A Star investigation has found Ontario’s most vulnerable children in the care of an unaccountable and non-transparent protection system. It keeps them in the shadows, far beyond what is needed to protect their identities.

“When people are invisible, bad things happen,” says Irwin Elman, the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth.

Child protection through children’s aid societies costs taxpayers almost $1.5 billion a year — a 300-per-cent increase since 1999.

Two years ago, the government-appointed child welfare commission concluded the system doesn’t provide value for money. It described services for vulnerable children as “fragmented, confused and siloed.”

CAS officials say responsibility for improving the lives of children in care can’t be theirs alone. The children tend to come from homes where poverty, mental-health issues or substance abuse are part of the problem. They insist government needs to do a far better job of co-ordinating services like housing, health care, education and police.

“How do we get the community to understand these are their kids, not CAS kids?” asks Rav Bains, executive director of Peel Children’s Aid, noting that the main reporting sources for suspected abuse are police and schools.

The failures are shrouded by a government that collects little standardized data on the experience of Ontario’s 23,300 children and youth in care, and largely keeps what it has secret.

The evidence pried from the child-protection system by the Star indicates there are reasons for concern.

A significant number of children and youth in care repeatedly change foster homes, group homes and schools. Almost half aged 5 or more are on “psychotropic or behaviour-altering drugs.” More than half end up dropping out of high school. And black or aboriginal children and youth are far more likely to be taken from their parents than white children, raising concerns about cultural bias and systemic racism.

It’s not known how many end up in the juvenile justice system, but Wendy Thomson, co-chair of the 2012 child welfare commission, says it is a common occurrence.

“They put kids in care,” says Natasha James, a former Crown ward, “and leave them to the wolves.”

James was placed in a Hamilton foster home when she was 13, then moved to a Brampton group home before ending up in a Toronto foster home. She changed high schools nine times during four years in care.

“When I went into care I was exposed to mental-health issues, prostitution, drug abuse, suicide — everything,” she says, referring to other wards with whom she lived. “You have your roommates slitting their wrists and you’re like, ‘What are you doing?’

“When you go into care, they should tell you it’s going to take 50 years to recover,” adds James, 26, now working as an advocate for youth in care.

In a brief last month to a legislative committee, Elman noted a case uncovered by his office of a 10-year-old boy who was physically restrained 108 times by staff in a group home during a 13-month period. The high number of restraints “did not generate any concern at either the ministry level or the Children’s Aid Society and appears to have gone unnoticed until it was brought to the attention of both by the Advocate’s Office,” Elman’s brief says.

Elman was before the committee to insist that a proposed bill giving him limited powers to investigate children’s aid societies doesn’t go far enough.

Senior government officials say the welfare commission’s recommendations are the focus of their efforts. The government has moved to make child protection more accountable. Children’s aid societies must sign agreements to stay within budget and set goals for the quality of care they should deliver.

And $122 million has so far been spent on a centralized computer system, known as CPIN, to track what happens to children in care. Implementation is technically challenging and behind schedule. Only three children’s aid societies have so far been patched into the central database.

The government also promises to set benchmarks that establish standards of care and assess the performance of children’s aid societies. But there is no time frame for the full implementation of these or the database. They won’t happen anytime soon.

“There could have been more provincial leadership decades ago,” says Nico Trocmé, director of the Centre for Research on Children and Families at McGill University and an expert on Ontario’s child-protection system.

“These are not middle-class kids with parents up in arms saying, ‘Why isn’t this being done,’” he says of the inaction. “These are the kids of disenfranchised people who, quite frankly, don’t have a very strong voice in government or anywhere else.”

Former Crown ward Dakota Hegler, 22, says she wasn't allowed to attend a new school in Brantford “until I signed papers promising to be a good kid.”

Jim Rankin / Toronto Star Order this photo

Ontario’s 46 children’s aid societies are private, non-profit corporations. They are regulated by the government and have the legal power to take children from their parents for reasons ranging from physical abuse to neglect. Most children are returned to their parents within a year, after some form of help is provided.

Those in continued need of protection are made “Crown wards” after a court decision. In 2013-14, about 7,000 children and youth in Ontario were wards of the government and another 1,000 were on the path to joining them.

They’re placed in foster homes, group homes or with relatives, and are monitored by children’s aid societies, which are responsible for their care. The government remains their parent until they’re adopted or turn 18. However, youth can decide to leave care at age 16.

The century-old child-protection system received a major overhaul in 2000. Until then, the Child and Family Services Act made supporting troubled families a priority and required a “substantial risk of harm” before children’s aid societies could remove children from their homes.

Tragic examples of children dying while in contact with a CAS — including a case where a child-protection worker was charged with criminal negligence — triggered province-wide alarm in the late 1990s, fuelled by coroners’ inquests and media stories.

Mike Harris’s Tory government responded by lowering the level of risk needed for intervention. Children could be taken from their parents if a “pattern of neglect” was found, or if domestic violence caused a child emotional harm.

The notion of maltreatment by “omission” was introduced, including almost no food in the home, unchanged diapers, peeling lead-based paint and a lack of clothes for the season, according to a detailed analysis of the changes by two Toronto university professors, York’s Karen Swift and Ryerson’s Henry Parada. And the duty of teachers, police and members of the public to report suspected abuse or neglect was expanded.

Swift and Parada note the changes came after the Harris government slashed welfare payments and social service funding. The result was more financial hardship for poor families as thresholds for apprehending children were lowered.

Between 1998 and 2003, family investigations conducted by children’s aid societies doubled, from about 64,000 to 130,000. The number of children in care spiked, and a funding formula based on volume did nothing to rein in the trend.

Cases of physical or sexual abuse account for fewer than 25 per cent of children and youth taken into care. Seventy per cent are apprehended because of violence between parents or neglect, which includes risk of physical harm due to a lack of supervision.

The reforms in 2000 also piled on government regulations. Children’s aid societies must account for a long list of prescribed actions, such as response times. Some front-line workers complain that 70 per cent of their time is spent filling out forms.

Not much in those forms accounts for what happens to children.

“The reporting system is not a child-based reporting system,” says Thomson, director of McGill’s School of Social Work.

In the mid-2000s, the Liberal government introduced changes to strike a better balance between protecting children and preserving families.

Agencies can respond to cases differently, depending on risk levels to children and the needs of families. Where the risk of abuse is low, families should be spared a “forensic” grilling and helped to access supports and community services.

Research hasn’t been conducted on the impact of this “differential response.” What’s clear is that children’s aid societies continue to massively intervene.

Agencies in Ontario investigate at a rate of 54 children per 1,000. Fully 53 per cent of these investigations find no evidence of abuse or risk of maltreatment, according to the most recent Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, a report that samples CAS cases every five years.

Quebec, by comparison, investigates at a rate of 18 children per 1,000, and 29 per cent turn out to be unfounded.

Senior government officials, who gave the Star a “technical briefing” about reform plans, said the statistics raise questions — “Are we doing too many investigations? Are too many kids coming into care?” But they don’t have the answers.

Also unanswered are the “unexplained variations of service levels” among children’s aid societies discovered by the child welfare commission. Why does one CAS, for example, place a lot of children and youth in group homes when another avoids doing so as much as possible? Which is the best practice?

Trocmé, lead investigator for the abuse incidence studies, describes a child-protection system “flying blind.”

“We don’t know whether we’re doing more harm than good,” he says.

“To use a health (care) analogy, if some physician thinks he’s got a great idea and starts to inject a bunch of kids with some new drug that’s never been tested, people would be up in arms no matter how good his intentions were. We’re not very far from that in child welfare.

“For the last 50 years, when there has been a big shift toward more evidence-based practice in many other fields, the idea that we continue to know so little about the impact of these (child-care) interventions is, frankly, unethical,” Trocmé adds.

Child-welfare work looks nothing like a science. Little is black and white when trying to balance child protection with keeping families together, particularly when poverty, mental health or substance abuse is usually part of the challenge. Often, front-line workers feel damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

The many saved by children’s aid societies tend to go unnoticed, as do those who do well while in care. Van was 12 when she called police, fearing violence between her parents would harm her two younger siblings. All three children were placed in a foster home.

Now 20, Van attends university and lives with her partner. She’s helped financially by scholarships and a government program that supports youth transitioning out of care. She also became the legal guardian of her 13-year-old brother and 16-year-old sister — the first arrangement of its kind at Peel Children’s Aid.

“I would never take back the decision that brought us into care,” says Van, who preferred not to give her family name.

But what many would consider a minimum requirement for success eludes a large number of children and youth in care: 54 per cent do not graduate high school.

Part of the problem is that the government is a parent without formal expectations for its children. It has allowed children’s aid societies to operate without benchmarks or standards that would judge their performance based on how children in their care are doing.

Are children expected to graduate high school? What extra help should be available when they don’t function at age-appropriate grade levels? When do home moves become unacceptable? How many changes in case workers can occur before trust breaks and frustration overflows? Is safety compromised when a child is returned to biological parents only to bounce back into care? How much control should a child or youth have over his or her care?

Many societies collect their own “performance” data but publicly reveal little more than head counts. They each have their own way of collecting and recording it. The result is a statistical mess. The child welfare commission couldn’t even figure out how many adhere to mandated response times when a call comes in about possible abuse.

The government’s record-keeping also frustrated the commission. Children’s aid societies must file reports to the government on incidents considered serious — when a child is physically restrained, for example. The government was unable to give the commission aggregate, province-wide statistics about the incidents.

Children’s aid societies, for their part, complain it has been years since they have seen provincial totals for information collected in annual government audits known as Crown Ward Reviews. Each CAS has a sample of their cases audited for data such as the number of times a child changes homes while in care.

The government insists its central database and promised benchmarks will eventually make things better. In the meantime, close observers see a nonchalant attitude about evidence that already exists, such as the number of times children in care change homes.

“The problem is there is no tradition in Ontario child welfare of looking at the evidence, looking at the data and saying, ‘OK, what does this mean for practice?’” says Raymond Lemay, the highly respected executive director of the Prescott-Russell children’s aid society until his retirement this summer.

The Children’s Aid Society of Toronto has been tracking the ethnic and racial makeup of children and youth in its care for several years. Blacks are significantly overrepresented, a fact that has angered parents and led to talks dating back at least eight years between community leaders and senior government officials, including the youth minister. Yet the ministry says it has never asked the Toronto CAS for the racial data.

Of children in care in Toronto, 31 per cent were born to black parents. A further 9.8 per cent of children in care had one parent who is black.

Educational challenges for children in care suggest a similarly sluggish response. Data on this and other issues has been captured province-wide since at least 2008 in annual, government-mandated “Looking After Children” surveys known as OnLAC. They revealed the troubling high-school dropout rate and the fact that 63 per cent of 6-year-olds in care are more than a year behind the grade level they should be at.

The surveys also track barriers to academic success. They note that children and youth in care, due to changes in residence, live through several unplanned school changes: 32 per cent change schools three or four times, and 25 per cent more than five times.

There is no obligation for the new school to enrol them during the term, says Thomson, the former child welfare commissioner. “They’re sometimes out of school for weeks,” she adds.

Former Crown ward Dakota Hegler, 22, recalls being stigmatized when she tried to attend a new school in Brantford.

“I wasn’t allowed to start until I signed papers promising to be a good kid,” she says.

“You don’t make all the other kids sign papers saying they’re going to be good kids so why are you making me?” she asks, noting the demand delayed her entry into the school for a week.

Missing school is another barrier. OnLAC surveys reveal a significant number of absentee days are due to CAS-related work: 15 per cent for meetings with child-care workers, 6 per cent for access visits from biological parents and 4 per cent due to completing the OnLAC survey. Appointments with mental-health workers were responsible for another 15 per cent of days off school.

The figures suggest an attitude in child protection that “it doesn’t matter if a kid misses a day of school,” says Lemay. Absenteeism could be reduced “tomorrow,” he adds, by simply having front-line workers and others meet children and youth when school is out.

Reducing the number of school changes with busing, or insisting on quick entry into new schools, also seem like easy fixes. The government promises “joint protocols” between the education and youth ministries on a range of measures to boost academic achievement. They’re at the “development” phase.

The government and CASs are moving slowly. And years of inaction have left much to do.

“Frankly, children will sometimes get what they need, sometimes not,” says Aron Shlonsky, a University of Toronto social work professor involved in the reform process. “Sometime this year or next there will be a child who dies. And the system is doing what it can to fix what it knows it can fix. But it’s a long road.”

The reporters on this story can be reached at children@thestar.ca

Reforming the system

A 2012 provincial commission into Ontario’s child-welfare system recommended the following reforms:

• Children’s aid societies must be “reconfigured” to improve service and provide value for money. (Amalgamation has reduced the number of societies by eight since 2011.)
• The volume-based funding formula encourages children’s aid societies to take children into care and should be changed. (The government responded by deeming that 50 per cent of the funding be allocated based on the socio-demographic makeup of CAS catchment areas.)
• Children’s aid societies must be more accountable and transparent. (Children’s aid societies now have to sign “accountability agreements.”)
• The government should set province-wide benchmarks that test how well children’s aid societies serve children. (The government promises to do so but won’t say when. A central computer database that connects all societies is also being set up to track what happens to children in care. Only three children’s aid societies have been patched into the database so far.)
• Children’s aid societies can’t do their jobs properly if services for children, including health and education, remain fragmented. Stronger integration across all services for children is needed.
• The government should define the services that must be provided by every CAS in Ontario.
• The government should set targets that encourage caring for children within their own families.
• The government should reduce the administrative burden on children’s aid societies so that workers can spend more time serving children. (The government set up an advisory committee for this.)
• A province-wide strategy is needed to improve the lives of aboriginal children in care. (The government says it is working on one.)
• Children’s aid societies should be required to “collect accurate data about children’s cultural and racial backgrounds” to better serve the province’s diverse population.

The reporters on this story can be reached at children@thestar.ca

Source: Toronto Star
The original page includes additional videos and interactive graphics.

The next article tells of an immigrant family wrecked by CAS. The family came from a culture respecting parental rights and parental authority. CAS could only characterize their cultural attitude as uncooperative. The story follows a pattern seen by fixcas many times. Criminal charges were laid against the parents. The charges became the reason for taking the children, this time in a summary process in which the parents could not call witnesses or cross-examine CAS evidence. When the criminal charges came to court they were dismissed, but the family was not restored. While the family destruction was in progress, the parents had to watch their children abused in foster care.

Fixcas would ordinarily ignore a story with false names, but this one is mentioned because it is an Ontario newspaper exposing a Canadian case.

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Immigration story turns into a nightmare with CAS

A Cameroonian-Canadian couple's nightmare story involving the child welfare and criminal justice systems sees loss of four children.

By: Sandro Contenta News, Insight Jim Rankin, Published on Thu Dec 11 2014

Past airport-style metal detectors and uniformed guards, the waiting room chairs outside the family courtrooms of 393 University Ave. are filled to capacity.

Also striking in this Toronto courthouse, on a day in July, is that almost all of the faces are black.

Black fathers, black mothers and, in the case of one couple originally from Cameroon, two dozen supporters, all here in last chance bids to keep children from becoming wards of the state.

Alice and Jean, young professionals in their 40s, came to Canada in an immigration story that has played out for decades: a couple seeking better opportunities for their children. In this case, four of them.

Three years after their arrival, their world fell apart. Their children were taken by the children’s aid society in the fall of 2011. Alice and Jean were arrested and charged with assaulting their two oldest children, a 13-year-old boy and 10-year-old daughter. The criminal charges were dropped three years later. But Alice and Jean, whose names have been changed for this story, are still without their children.

“They will face an extremely uphill battle to get the kids back,” says Cherry Isaacs-Reynolds, the lawyer for Alice and Jean, adding it’s unlikely a court would uproot children who have been away so long.

The parents have had no access to the children. They’re aware, however, that their oldest boy was caught in a sexual position with a younger sister while in the same foster home. The eldest daughter is in a group home, struggling with suicidal thoughts and on anti-depressants, her mother says.

“Suddenly, children that have been healthy all their lives have all kinds of problems,” Alice says.

The couple arrived in Canada in 2008 after working in Germany, France and the United States. Their two eldest children spent four years living with their grandparents in Cameroon before joining their parents.

Their oldest son was bullied at school, starting when he was 10. The parents clashed often with teachers and principals, demanding they do more. One day, the boy told a teacher his father had hit him with a shoe.

The parents said it never happened. They described themselves as strict parents who at times spoke loudly to their children, using words that might sound aggressive to people not familiar with the Cameroonian culture. Jean admitted to having the boy kneel in a corner when he misbehaved. Toronto’s Catholic CAS took the children in March 2011 and returned them two months later.

To the parents, the idea that an agency could take away their children was unimaginable. They agreed to take parenting courses, but insisted on their rights as parents at every turn. That didn’t help their cause. CAS documents repeatedly labelled Alice and Jean as uncooperative.

That November, Alice says her 10-year-old daughter began stealing and getting into trouble. The parents told her she would be sent to Cameroon to live with her grandparents if she didn’t change her ways. The girl ran away from home. She told the CAS she had suffered repeated beatings at the hands of her parents, a charge the parents deny.

The children were made Crown wards with no parental access following a summary judgment hearing, a controversial step that forgoes a trial. Witnesses are not called to testify or to be cross-examined.

“This is a case where their hands were basically tied behind their backs” says Isaacs-Reynolds. “They weren’t allowed to bring any witnesses forward. They weren’t allowed to do anything whatsoever.”

The summary judgment highlighted the criminal charges against the parents and concluded the children would not be safe in their home. Months later, the charges were dropped.

This past July, Alice and Jean were in family court to try and get their children back. The room was filled with supporters from the African-Canadian community. Alice’s mother had flown in from Cameroon.

In the waiting area outside, the provincial Office of the Children’s Lawyer, which represents the interests of children, was indiscreetly telling another lawyer about the case, in a voice loud enough for others to hear. The parents “terrorized” the kids, the lawyer claimed, adding their uncooperative attitude was the source of much of their troubles. “All they had to do was say, ‘Oh, we over-reacted and we’re sorry.’”

Alice and Jean say they’ll never apologize for aggressively trying to keep their family intact.

“I can’t live without my children,” Alice says. “I’m going to fight. I’m going to do whatever is legally possible to get them back.”

Source: Toronto Star

Brantford social worker Jerry Walsh is a former boxer and looks like it. People say he still looks mean.

Most of the article is about Carolyn. At the age of four she told her mom: “I want to scratch and bite myself until I die.” Shrinks tagged her with the label ADHD and by age six she was on mind-altering drugs. She began misbehaving, enduring a decade of on-again off-again interventions by social workers, psychiatrists and police. It culminated in a recent suicide attempt, swallowing a full bottle of Midol. She is now living with her aunt in a placement the reporter calls voluntary. The Star manages to paint a positive picture of the social worker. This story uses false names.

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Through the eyes of a CAS front-line worker

Brant Family and Children's Services veteran Jerry Walsh takes a gentler approach to the families he encounters. The Star joined him on his rounds to discover if it is working.

Jerry Walsh of Brant Family and Children’s Services has an office at Major Ballachey Public School in Brantford. Kids at school call him “Mr. Jerry.”

Jim Rankin / Toronto Star

By: Sandro Contenta News, Insight Laurie Monsebraaten, Social justice reporter Jim Rankin, Feature reporter Hidy Ng, Published on Fri Dec 12 2014

BRANTFORD—On an overcast day in late July, Jerry Walsh drives past homes he knows by the stories that have played out within them. Stories of physical and sexual abuse, mental illness, addiction, poverty, broken families, struggling single mothers, sometimes redemption, but always involving children.

Many of these homes are in low-income areas of the city.

Walsh is a front-line worker with Brant Family and Children’s Services, and atypical of children’s aid society employees: he is male and, at 47, not yet burned out by what he has come across in his 12 years on the job.

On this day, and on another the Star will spend with him, Walsh will drop in on two cases that highlight the toll mental illness and addiction exacts from families — and the gaps in service these families encounter. There will also be a visit with a rare success story, a mom who turned her life around, thanks to Walsh.

“There are some really, really good stories,” says Walsh. “Usually, in my experience, it’s one a year where it’s totally altered their life.”

Walsh follows the progressive, anti-oppressive philosophy practised at Brant, which places an emphasis on keeping children with families whenever possible and also seeks to match families with needed services.

A minority of cases encountered by Ontario’s child-protection workers involve physical or sexual abuse. Most cases involve issues of neglect, which stem from mental-health problems, addiction and poverty.

Keeping families intact is not always possible. Children must sometimes be placed in foster or group-home care. In a way, those cases are more straightforward. Most are messy.

“The broader public thinks that apprehension is the way to go, and it is not,” says Walsh. “I think that you have to be open-minded. These are complicated problems with unorthodox and messy solutions.”

In many cases, minor things that went unaddressed or were not adequately dealt with by social, educational and health support systems fester into family breakdowns of Shakespearean dimensions.

“Sometimes,” says Walsh, “putting a little bit more money in earlier might be a better investment.”

Over several months, Brant Family and Children’s Services opened its doors and books to the Star and brokered access to some of its client families and youth who were willing to share their experiences.

Names and details have been changed so as not to identify them. All hope that in sharing their stories there will be improvements to the systems and ministries that intersect with children and parents — and to the child-protection system itself.

Band-Aids and silos

School is out for the summer at Major Ballachey Public School in Brantford, where Jerry Walsh keeps a year-round office, tucked off the library in the turn-of-the-century building.

Brant operates community offices, including this one in a school. Another sits in a townhouse complex. Having the children’s aid society in your school and as your neighbour may seem like the height of surveillance, but that’s not the goal; instead, Walsh’s agency places families at the heart of its service.

It is a philosophy that aims to go beyond silos and quick fixes.

Pictures of Jerry Walsh’s kids and posters made by his wife, an illustrator, line the walls of his school office. Tucked in drawers, amid the articles, resource books and stuffed animals, are pictures of children and families he has helped.

Walsh teaches at McMaster University. Of his class of 60, only four students are men. In the long-distance masters of social work program he is in at Dalhousie University, he is the only man.

He is built like a boxer — he was one, crossing paths with the likes of Lennox Lewis — and “people say I look mean.” Which helps. The job exposes one to horrific and heart-wrenching circumstances, not to mention verbal and physical threats from desperate parents.

In a recent survey of Ontario child-protection workers, a quarter reported being assaulted during their career, and nearly half said they had been threatened. Nearly 70 per cent reported verbal or written abuse.

Typically, the children’s aid worker who rings the doorbell is young, female, fresh out of school and childless. They do not last long on the front lines. They may also go strictly by “the book,” leaving little or no room for situations that cry out for problem solving, as opposed to protection. It is a tough job that attracts good people, says Walsh; people who, contrary to perception, are not in it to take children away.

When Walsh arrives on a doorstep, most people are terrified. The first thing he does is assess what he’s dealing with.

“If I get a kid with a black eye, I know I need to do a forensic model. I know I need to find out what happened. What are the details, what are the risks, what’s connected to it? Is it mental health? Is it poverty? Is it substance abuse? Is it sexual abuse?”

If there are concrete signs of abuse, there will likely be an immediate apprehension.

“The strongest of people, the toughest of characters hardened by this world, they go like Jell-O,” says Walsh. “When you take their kids away, it isn’t like scratching their BMW. It is a hurt that is so deep and it tears you apart.

“But there are some cases that you just say, you know what, this is different and I’m going to go about it in a more gentle manner,” says Walsh.

“I know how to connect with people. I know how to advocate for you getting what you need. Everybody wants something. They want their problem to go away. They want somebody to listen. And they just don’t have enough influence.”

He’s helped people sort out utility bills, leaned on landlords to fix decrepit apartments and brought breakfast when there was no money for food.

Kids at school call him “Mr. Jerry.” From his office window, he watches the kids in the playground and he can see parents giving hugs as they drop off and pick up kids, in an environment that is not threatening. He may one day be called to their homes and, as a familiar face, be able to ease the fears and put them in control of the situation.

“Social work has its challenges. We’re not doctors and we’re not lawyers, but there are benefits to that. We’re eclectic, and have that broad view of how does society impact you? How does poverty impact you? How does isolation impact you? All those things.”

Sometimes, help is fleeting.

“I think about child welfare, that we’re a little reactive,” says Walsh. “We have to have a problem and then we get involved, and then we do the quick Band-Aid solution.”

That was the case involving the first family we are to meet.

The Dead Girl

Walsh leaves city limits and heads for a nearby town, where a couple about to be wed has made a decision to become temporary parents to a teenaged niece, Carolyn. Conflict with her parents culminated in Carolyn’s suicide attempt and a note, which she signed, “The Dead Girl.”

After years of mental-health issues, and five openings and closings of her children’s aid file, it took this crisis to get the undivided attention of a case worker. That worker was Walsh.

“They’ve tried to manage this out,” says Walsh.

There have been many calls by Carolyn’s parents to police for help in calming her, counselling sessions that run out too soon, conflicting diagnoses and pleas to politicians.

“We didn’t want to be too intrusive. Then it became crucial again … and they begged us, don’t close this file.”

Carolyn, tall and looking more like the woman she will become than the girl she is, sits on a sofa in her Aunt Rachel’s new home. Rachel is to be married to her fiancé, Ben in a few months. Both in their 30s, they had been living in another Ontario city when the call came asking if they would be willing to care for Carolyn. In just weeks, Rachel and Ben relocated to a new town so Carolyn would not have to change school boards.

Without any children of their own, Rachel and Ben have become temporary parents to a teen, in a voluntary agreement that only one person in the immediate and extended family is unhappy with — Carolyn’s mother.

Carolyn’s story begins when, at the age of 4, she told her mother: “I want to scratch and bite myself until I die.”

This family’s story is about mental health, which knows no socio-economic boundaries. And it is about gaps in the health- and mental-health-care systems and other support systems, despite the best efforts of knowledgeable parents to navigate and advocate for their child.

By the time she was 6, Carolyn was on medication for ADHD. Later, she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She would self-harm using bobby pins. She would lash out. Often, after frantic calls to crisis lines, her parents had to turn to the police.

Carolyn’s mom Lynn sought help for Carolyn and eventually needed help herself for depression. Carolyn’s younger brother began acting out as well. Carolyn’s father Mike was thrust into the role of trying to keep the nuclear family from completely blowing up.

Carolyn spent time in a program that taught her coping skills. There were multiple youth workers in her life. In 2012, she spent nearly four months at the Child and Parent Resource Institute in London, where she saw a child psychiatrist. (There were none in the Brantford area.)

“It was fun, but I missed home a lot. I wouldn’t want to go back,” says Carolyn, who learned that breathing exercises and listening to music — “Hedley, big time” — helped calm her.

At CPRI, they did a “med wash” — taking her off all medications — watched her, and re-medicated her. She went home and there was a period of calm. When the school year began in 2013, Carolyn found herself at a new school, where bullying became a problem. She fled to a basement washroom because she was being picked on, and a social worker, alerted to the crisis, sat outside the door, listening and talking her through it.

At home, the calm disappeared. Despite treatments and diagnoses — and, indeed, perhaps because of a lack of continuity in care — things spiralled out of control.

This past spring, she says she had a bad week at school and decided that, if the next week did not go well, “my life’s done. I’m ending it.” It did not go well. She swallowed a full bottle of Midol and left the note outside her bedroom door.

She was rushed to hospital, where there was no child psychiatrist. After a quick assessment, Carolyn was deemed fit to go home. The adult psychiatrist didn’t know the history — another example of the gaps the family had been encountering.

Her mother kept Carolyn sedated for a couple of days until she could get her to London, where a child psychiatrist admitted her for a week.

Carolyn made it known that she no longer wanted to live at home, and that she would kill herself if she had to return. That prompted an emergency meeting and the kinship placement with Rachel.

“It makes me sad how much (Carolyn’s) had to go through,” Rachel says. “She’s a good kid.”

Carolyn’s grandmother, Ann, a retired health-care administrator, felt she could only watch from the sidelines as her daughter’s family blew up. Extended family, until then, were not privy to the big picture and afraid they might lose access to the children if they spoke up. But they could see what led up to this critical point.

“We’ve been in and out and in and out of services all along, which has been detrimental I feel to both (Carolyn) and the whole family’s (ability) to heal and move forward. We’d probably be a lot further ahead if we’d had some consistency in services here.”

Walsh, getting ready to go, says maybe the family would not be at this point if the right things had happened when Carolyn was younger, and programming lasted for as long as was needed.

For now, the arrangement for Carolyn to stay with relatives is voluntary.

Rock bottom

Jerry parks outside Carolyn’s family home in Brantford. Houses tell stories, including the one where Carolyn is no longer living. On the coffee table: self-help books, including The Explosive Child. On the living room ceiling: broken plaster.

“That’s actually from the door being slammed so many times,” says Carolyn’s father, Mike, who holds down a good-paying professional job. He, along with Carolyn’s mother, Lynn, who had a hospitality sector job, have become experts at telling their family’s story, in part because they have had to repeat it so often to a changing cast of health-care and social support providers.

Often, Carolyn’s crises did not happen during 9-to-5 hours, when there was access to counsellors.

“We would just let her do what she needed to do to calm down, whether it’s screaming or putting holes in walls or attempting to hurt herself,” says Lynn.

“All we could do was keep her safe and get through it. There weren’t supports to come out, other than the police, who knew our address very, very well, unfortunately.”

Early on, Mike was the “bad guy” for making Carolyn take her medications. At one point, Carolyn told a doctor that her dad slapped, choked and beat her. Later, a CAS case worker asked Carolyn about the alleged abuse. She said none of it happened. It “very quickly became the story of the boy who cried wolf,” says Mike.

After Lynn spent 49 days in hospital for mental-health treatments of her own, and Mike was left to tend to the family, Mom became the “bad guy” in Carolyn’s eyes. There were no problems while she was away, so she must be the problem.

It strained the marriage. That the couple is still together is remarkable but not unexpected. As Walsh points out, they have a sense of humour and finish each other’s thoughts.

“When you have this kind of scenario going on for so many years and the services just aren’t available, eventually the ability to cope with it does break down,” says Mike.

“You scream and you ask for help continuously, and you don’t get it, even from the children’s aid,” says Lynn.

“Because they’re only able to keep the case open as long as they can, based upon the need,” adds Mike.

“There was also no child-protection issue until (Carolyn) said, ‘You send me home and I’m going to kill myself,’” says Lynn.

“There is nothing that is proactive,” says Lynn. “It is all reactive.”

Lynn says the situation is “killing” her emotionally. She isn’t sure if she will ever get over the hurt caused by some of the names her daughter has called her, but she sees that she is also “numb and confused” and in need of healing herself.

“So here we are. That’s us, rock bottom.”

The news that Carolyn would likely be going into care was greeted by her mother with a mixture of relief, fear, confusion and uncertainty.

After all the short-term action, reaction and inaction, there was a commitment.

And then another feeling crept up: that she was an inadequate mother, and that she would feel less of a sting if Carolyn had been placed with a stranger, rather than Lynn’s sister Rachel.

“It’s hard as a parent to feel inadequate,” says Lynn. “It’s hard as a parent to feel like we failed our child. It’s hard as a parent to put them in a better situation ... I feel like if she had gone into care it would have been a more neutral scenario, where maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much because it wouldn’t be so personalized.”

Mike sees the situation differently. “I don’t feel negative about the scenario and that’s specifically because I’ve been trying really hard to remain positive.”

He worries for Rachel and fiancé Ben, though.

“I’m happy that (Carolyn’s) with family,” says Mike. “Do I think that they have some challenges ahead of them? Yes. In the next six months, I think that she’s going to put them through the wringer, not only with mental health, but she’s a 14-year-old and they’ve never had kids.”

Walsh assures Lynn and Mike that family and children services is not backing out and that he is “not going to give up” on them.

“This is a great story, waiting to be written,” he tells them. “Don’t shut me out. Let’s invest now or maybe this young man (the couple’s 9-year-old son, John) won’t have a mom who functions well.”

Lynn’s mixed feelings about her sister’s new role means Walsh leaves with only one signature on the voluntary placement agreement: Mike’s.

Like being shot

Tranquility, a mom in her 30s, answers the door to her tidy, small home, her face unblemished and without makeup. It is mid-August, and this house call is different from the one Walsh made in February, when someone very close to Tranquility called to say she was using again and feared she might die.

Back then her face was a mess, covered in acne, which she picked at. Her hands, where the needles delivered melted cocaine into blue veins, also gave it away. This was her second strike, having avoided losing her children over drugs in 2012.

On this August day, Tranquility was reaching the expiry point of a voluntary deal that saw her two boys, aged 6 and 9, live with their father, Albert, while she cleaned up, attended programs and offered proof of kicking the habit through urine tests. Tranquility tells Walsh she has been testing clean since March.

“The day (Walsh) took my children, it was like my world was over,” says Tranquility, who had resorted to street drugs after an opioid prescription to treat a pinched nerve ran out.

As Walsh recalls, he came to the house with a student social worker and broke the news that the kids would have to come with them. Tranquility collapsed into his lap, like she “had been shot.”

“For about three weeks I just went downhill. It was horrible. It was the worst experience of my life,” says Tranquility.

Tranquility went to detox and is on meds to help prevent another relapse. There are nightly AA meetings and a full schedule of appointments with counsellors and drop-in programs. There are house visits with her two youngest kids now. She hopes they will be joining her permanently.

A bowl of crayons and a pad of paper sit near the kitchen, and a bird chirps in a cage near a door off the living room. It leads to a bedroom where another son, her oldest from another relationship, once slept. The teenager lives with Tranquility’s mother. He left after hearing arguments between Tranquility and a boyfriend, who has been with her for two years and is supportive of her sobriety.

The oldest son will likely never be coming home. Her mother, says Tranquility, offers him things that she will never be able to, including material things.

Money has been a problem. Her habit was running her $40 to $100 a day and she fell behind on her bills. Rent is $800 a month, and without child support coming in for the past few months, she is left with $700 in welfare. She knows the local food banks.

Tranquility holds out hope her two youngest boys will soon be joining her at home. The courts say she has custody, but that could change if challenged by Albert, her ex. It is a likely scenario. There is also a question of medication for their autistic son. Albert does not trust Tranquility with them and administers the doses himself.

Until — and if — they are handed back, the boys have visits to her home, during which her boyfriend is not to be around. Every few hours, Albert drops by to administer his older son’s medication.

Walsh sees hope in Tranquility.

“You’re turning it around, which is a great thing,” he tells her.

She in turn tells him that she loves him. “I tell everybody that you are a blessing in disguise, and I thank you. It’s been a life experience and we’ve gone through a lot together. I wouldn’t change my worker for the world.”

What is clear is that there will be no third chance. Another relapse, and this will likely no longer be a voluntary arrangement.

For now, the “reintegration period has come and gone,” says Walsh. “There have been no problems, she’s looking good, she’s participating with her (programs) and the society is not going to stand in the way of her taking back possession of the children.”

Back in his car, Jerry speaks of the problems drugs can bring. “It messes people right up,” he says. He recalls one young girl who ate with a spoon used to heat up crack.

With Tranquility, he often shows up unannounced to check on her.

“It’s a delicate balance of authority and power.”

Good dad

We meet Albert, Tranquility’s ex, outside his workplace.

Albert didn’t know why he was getting the call from Tranquility to take his sons, but he had a pretty good idea and he did not hesitate.

As a non-custodial dad, he says he heard stories from friends and acquaintances about Tranquility’s drug abuse. What was missing, he says, “was people willing to stand up for these children” and go on record to family and children’s services.

“I don’t think that there is anybody out there that actually will make their focus the children, and stand up for them,” says Albert. He made an application to the Office of the Children’s Lawyer, a provincial body that speaks for children embroiled in custody and other kinds of cases, “and I got denied.”

Ultimately, says Jerry, the child is the client but when the “mother is the one with the problem, you end up focusing on the problem.”

Albert, who is in a stable relationship and has been married for a year, thinks the situation with Tranquility “finally got bad enough that more needed to be done, and the (children’s aid) society is a reactive agency. They step in when there is something to be seen or something to be stopped, and I want to prevent it.

“It’s definitely hard to be a dad in a system that is automatically geared toward giving the benefit of the doubt and custody to the mother,” says Albert. “One thing that this whole situation has taught me is to be patient, something Jerry told me in the beginning. I’ll fight this as long as I have to.”

Success

Every now and then, Walsh gets a call from Chantelle, a 43-year-old mother of a now-grown son. In the most recent update, Chantelle told Walsh that her son, 19, was studying to be a chef, and she was about to start college for a two-year social services diploma, followed by perhaps a bachelor of arts degree. She had moved back to the Brantford area and would like to meet. She wanted a reference letter.

After calling on Albert and Tranquility, Walsh dropped by.

The first time they met was eight years ago; like Tranquility, Chantelle had a cocaine problem. An acquaintance had called CAS because she was “going down way too fast.” Her habit was up to $1,000 a day.

Chantelle had just finished shooting up when Walsh called.

“I was all frigged up and he was sitting at my kitchen table and was really great about it all,” says Chantelle. “He knew I was high and he had given me an opportunity to find my son a placement for a home and to get myself into rehab, and he was allowing me to make that choice. A lot of people would not have done that.”

Chantelle cleaned up and taught Walsh his earliest lessons about addiction.

She pulls out a letter, which she wrote in support of her academic endeavours. It reads: “I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for the support of an amazing social worker from Brant CAS, I don’t know where I would be today. He believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself.”

“He treated me like a human being, not like a piece of garbage,” she tells the Star. “I think (workers) need to have more sensitivity training.”

They part, and Walsh’s day is done.

“How we make a difference sometimes, you just don’t know,” says Walsh. “Sometimes you just do make a difference.”

Epilogue

Walsh wrote a recommendation letter for Chantelle for a bursary application. She started classes in September.

Albert took Tranquility to court, seeking custody of their boys. Walsh, says Albert, warned that the court might side with Tranquility. Albert says he relied on Walsh’s advice and struck a deal with Tranquility. The boys will stay with him and he has a final say on medical decisions. She will have visits every other weekend and two evenings per week.

In the end, Albert was not happy with Walsh, telling the Star he got the feeling the courts would have sided with him. He and his wife felt that in the end he couldn’t be trusted. Not surprising, given that Walsh’s primary client was not Albert.

After safety meetings with Brant Family and Children’s Services, Carolyn went back home to live with her parents in October, as she wished. The family is healthier, says Walsh. Carolyn’s mom is doing better, and in a recent phone call to the Star, she sounded like a different person, happier and more optimistic. Carolyn’s aunt, Rachel, who had taken Carolyn in, worries the family did not have enough time to heal and get meaningful counselling. Walsh assures: “The community is still quite wrapped up with this family.”

Source: Toronto Star

The next article presents the fear experienced by a (black) mother on encountering a children's aid worker. The fear is the same, regardless of color.

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The anxiety of a black parent when CAS comes calling

Family counsellor describes the common scenario: ‘Of course, you are going to be angry.'

Beverly Valentine of the Jamaican Canadian Association.

Jim Rankin / Toronto Star Order this photo

Published on Thu Dec 11 2014

Black community members say the understandable anxiety black parents experience when schools call Children’s Aid to question their child contributes to the problem of overrepresentation.

Beverly Valentine, a family counsellor with the Jamaican Canadian Association, describes the all-too common scenario, confirmed by numerous Star interviews with parents involved with CAS .

You are looking for your child to come home and your child doesn’t come home and that’s when you find out that the CAS is involved and your child is being interrogated.

How are you going to react? Of course, you are going to be angry.

So the mother comes in and she’s heightened. What does the worker think? ‘She’s not co-operating. She’s being angry. She’s not listening’.

The mother wants to see her child. Obviously, she’s going to explode even more. So she gets branded as un-cooperative before the case even gets started. The police haven’t even been called.

It makes it even worse when the police officers come . . . she might get charged with assault because she got upset.

Now they are going to take the kids for sure because the mother has to go down to the (police) station to deal with the criminal charge.

If they can’t find the father or grandparents in time to take the children, they get put into foster care for the night.

And then they start the process. The mother gets more upset. The worker now has to defend her actions. She won’t say she made a mistake and should have been more empathetic towards (the mother)… it just develops and escalates from there.

Source: Toronto Star

The Star reports that children taken into custody are disproportionately black or aboriginal. The reporter suggests racism as the cause. Fixcas will suggest something else. CAS does not like to intervene in families that might fight back effectively, though the courts, through the political system or through grass-roots organizing. The families least likely to fight back are poor and in disfavored groups, such as the ones found by the Star.

How will CAS respond to the charge of racism? They might clean up their act. But, they might try to even the score by rounding up white children.

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Why are so many black children in foster and group homes?

A disproportionate number of Toronto-area children in foster and group-home care are black. Advocates are blaming poverty, cultural misunderstanding and racism.

Paul Chapman, who was 9 when he was removed from his family home, says many black youth "struggle" while in care. "They kind of lose themselves," he says.

Jim Rankin / Toronto Star

By: Sandro Contenta News, Insight Laurie Monsebraaten, Social justice reporter Jim Rankin, Published on Thu Dec 11 2014

In the Toronto area, black children are being taken from their families and placed into foster and group-home care at much higher rates than white children.

Numbers obtained by the Star indicate that 41 per cent of the children and youth in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto are black. Yet only 8.2 per cent of Toronto’s population under the age of 18 is black.

By contrast, 37 per cent of kids in the care of the Toronto CAS are white, at a time when more than half of the city’s population under the age of 18 is white.

Other figures obtained by the Star indicate the overrepresentation is provincewide.

“The gross overrepresentation of black kids in the CAS is like a modern-day residential schools system,” says Margaret Parsons, executive director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, which advocates on behalf of the province’s 590,000 black residents.

“This is another form of racial profiling,” she says. “They’re profiling black parents in a very negative way.”

Patricia knows first-hand how cultural misunderstandings can lead to black children being removed from their homes.

She was shocked when police and a Toronto children’s aid worker came to her tidy bungalow two years ago to say her granddaughters were being taken into care.

Patricia, whose name has been changed to protect the identity of her grandchildren, had been caring for the girls for about a decade, following the death of their mother in Jamaica.

They were living a comfortable life in Toronto. “For the little one, I was the only mother she ever knew,” says the soft-spoken woman.

That all changed in 2012. Her teenage granddaughter, facing suspension at school, told the principal she would be beaten with a baseball bat if her grandmother found out.

“She told them I was going to kill her,” says Patricia, who admits she disciplined her granddaughters with a slap now and then, but denies ever having struck the girls with an object.

“West Indian children, if something is going to happen, they say: ‘Oh my mother is going to kill me.’ It’s not that her mother is going to kill her. That’s how they speak,” Patricia insists.

Patricia was charged with numerous counts of assault with a weapon, involving multiple incidents. A landed immigrant, she says she was advised by her legal aid lawyer to plead guilty to some charges to avoid possible deportation. In a blur, she agreed.

As a result of her criminal record, she lost her job as a caregiver for the elderly. Unable to pay the mortgage, she lost her home. And her granddaughters.

“Everything fell apart,” she says.

Ontario’s 46 children’s aid societies are private, non-profit corporations. They are regulated by the government and have the legal power to take children from their parents for reasons ranging from physical abuse to neglect.

There are about 23,300 children and youth in care in Ontario. Most children are returned to their parents within a year, after some form of help is provided. Those in continued need of protection are made “Crown wards.” In 2013-14, about 7,000 children and youth in Ontario were wards of the government, living in foster care or group homes, and another 1,000 were on the path to joining them. The government remains their parent until they are adopted or turn 18. However, youth can decide to leave care at age 16.

The Toronto CAS was involved with 11,285 client families in 2013-14. It had 2,155 children in care. Another 624, over the age of 18, continued to get financial support through the agency.

The agency shared its numbers on black children in PowerPoint presentations with police, educators and black community members in private meetings across the city over the past year.

“We want to make sure that all of our community partners are comfortable with the data before we release it publicly,” says Toronto CAS spokesperson Rob Thompson. Police and schools are the largest source of CAS referrals, accounting for about 40 per cent of all calls, he says.

The Star spoke separately with people familiar with the presentations. Of children in care in Toronto, 31 per cent were born to black parents. A further 9.8 per cent of children in care had one parent who is black.

Presented with the numbers obtained by the Star, the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto confirmed Wednesday that they were accurate.

The data also showed that many of the black children in care were of Jamaican heritage.

Lawyers, black community leaders and child advocates say the overrepresentation of black children is due to cultural misunderstandings and stress and neglect created by poverty. They also believe systemic racism in the child protection system, and within the police and schools, is at play.

“We received a call because a child was sent to school with roti,” says Danielle Mitchell, a child protection worker at Peel CAS.

Kike Ojo of Peel Children's Aid Society says white foster parents, despite good intentions, may not meet the needs of black youth.

Jim Rankin/Toronto Star

The teacher believed the popular Caribbean flatbread, usually filled with goat or chicken curry, was “not healthy or sustainable for this child,” Mitchell says. “And that’s the school system …”

Corrie Tuyl, manager of Toronto CAS’s north branch, says workers have told her about a school that called with a referral simply because a child was from Jamaica.

Everton Gordon, executive director of the Jamaican Canadian Association, believes police go into black homes with the same bias that results in black youth being racially profiled on the street.

“These institutions have problems with black people to begin with,” Gordon says, referring to police and schools. “The minute it’s a black family it sets off alarm bells.”

Front-line CAS workers tend to be young and inexperienced. When they see something that doesn’t conform to life in middle-class, white homes, their reaction is, “Oh my gosh, red flags,” says Danielle Mitchell, a child protection worker at Peel CAS.

A recent provincial survey of about 7,000 Ontario children who have been in care for more than one year shows that about 12 per cent are of African or Caribbean descent. Meanwhile, only about 5 per cent of Ontario’s children under age 18 are from those communities.

A 2012 report by a provincial commission into child welfare found that “the system was not responding effectively to the diversity of Ontario’s population.”

The report noted an increased risk of misunderstandings when child protection officers are called to intervene. Poverty, inadequate housing, language barriers and poor education aggravate the power imbalance these families experience, the report added.

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Most children’s aid societies in Ontario don’t collect data on race. The child welfare commission recommended that ethnic background information be captured to assess how the agencies respond to diverse communities. But the government refuses to make capturing that data mandatory in a new computer database. The database will connect all 46 children’s aid societies and standardize how they collect and record information.

The few societies that have that kind of data are reluctant to talk about it.

In the United States, where black and native American children are three times more likely to be in care than white children, race-based data has been collected and publicized for years.

American studies had shown that black parents are no more likely to abuse or neglect their children than white parents. In 2010, a study prepared for the U.S. government found higher rates of child abuse or neglect among black parents.

Researchers concluded the results were influenced by the 2008 recession, which affected blacks more than whites and caused more strain on families. Poverty, it noted, is the strongest predictor of maltreatment rates.

Most children’s aid societies in Ontario don’t keep income statistics on the families they serve. The new provincial database won’t capture that information either. But local CAS officials know poverty is often a factor.

“Sometimes people don’t want to make the connection between poverty and child protection,” says David Rivard, chief executive officer for the Toronto CAS. “But there is a correlation. That’s the reality.”

A recent report on child poverty in Toronto co-authored by the agencynoted that 41 per cent of children of southern and eastern African heritage are growing up poor — more than three times the rate of children with roots in the British Isles. Meantime, 26 per cent of children whose families are from the Caribbean and 25 per cent from North Africa live in poverty.

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Groups serving the black community are trying to bridge the cultural divide that can land children in care. The common use of spanking to discipline children in Africa and the Caribbean, for example, can lead to astonished parents being charged with assault.

Some families have been investigated for yelling at their children, says Gordon of the Jamaican Canadian Association, who witnessed such cases when he worked for Toronto Catholic CAS in the late 1990s.

Gordon says parents who get their backs up when confronted with a CAS worker — “You want to tell me how to raise my kid?” — are branded unco-operative, heightening the chances of the child being removed.

If abuse is suspected, children are assessed by psychologists who are paid by the CAS, and parents have no say. Nor do they have much opportunity to present their stories in court.

Everton Gordon, executive director of the Jamaican Canadian Association, says there is a bias in the system. “These institutions have problems with black people to begin with,” he says, referring to police and schools.

Jim Rankin/Toronto Star

A judge often decides to remove a child by summary judgment, a process based on written evidence, largely produced by children’s aid societies.

“If you steal a pen, you have a right to a fair trial,” says family court lawyer Thora Espinet. “But you don’t with summary judgment.”

While children’s aid societies try to place children in culturally appropriate homes, it’s not always possible.

Paul Chapman, 23, who works in the provincial child advocate’s office, was 9 years old when he and his six siblings were taken from their struggling single mother. He was placed with white foster parents. On Sundays, he missed big breakfasts with Caribbean dishes, and going to church.

He recalls one dinner when his foster parents served him perogies.

“I had no idea what the hell a perogy was. I said I’m not eating that,” says Chapman.

“I think a lot of (black) youth struggle,” he says.

“It’s because they don’t know who they are. They don’t know what to do. They kind of lose themselves. They lose their identity.”

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After the Star began asking about the overrepresentation of black youth in care, the Ministry of Children and Youth Services met with CAS officials, the provincial child advocate and Parsons’ African Canadian Legal Clinic.

Children’s aid officials and the legal clinic late last month submitted a funding proposal for a project to look into why the numbers are so high and how to reduce them.

“This cannot be just another study or training program,” Parsons insists. “What I want to see is concrete, substantive change — a reduction in those numbers.”

Parsons and other advocates say the numbers won’t go down until family counsellors from their community team up with CAS workers on every protection investigation involving a black child. That’s how Texas, for example, reduced the number of black children and youth in care.

“I’m not saying there aren’t kids in our community who should be in care,” Parsons says. “But the first approach for an African-Canadian child should not be apprehension and care. And that’s what the numbers are saying to me right now.”

Psychologist Sonia Mills-Minster runs a program aimed at keeping black youth out of foster and group-home care.

Jim Rankin/Toronto Star

A pilot project in the Toronto CAS is keeping some youths out of care by referring black families at risk to a counselling service for the black community headed by therapist Sonia Mills-Minster.

The program teaches parenting skills and anger management, and connects families to black community services that deal with mental health and addiction.

Fewer than 10 of the 100 families counselled over the last three years have seen a child go into care, Mills-Minster says. Understanding the culture makes all the difference.

During a “technical briefing” with the Star last month, senior government officials said they are prepared to work with the community on training and best practices for CAS workers who investigate black families. They suggested it might require the kind of culturally sensitive approach used with aboriginal families.

Parsons says provincial leadership and action is vital.

“At the end of the day, it is about the welfare of our children,” she says. “Something is amiss. Something is fundamentally wrong and we can’t turn a blind eye anymore.”

Correction - December 11, 2011: This article was edited from a previous version that misattributed a quote by Danielle Mitchell, a child protection worker at Peel CAS, to Kike Ojo, diversity and anti-oppression manager for the Peel CAS. In fact, it was Mitchell who said she received a call because a child was sent to school with a roti.

The reporters on this story can be reached at children@thestar.ca .

Source: Toronto Star

In this article the Star suggests yet another ethnic children's aid society, this one for black children.

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Black children’s aid society needed, lawyers say

Toronto black community leaders say the African Canadian community needs its own children’s aid society.

TORONTO, ON - DECEMBER 12 - African Canadian Legal Clinic policy and research lawyer, Anthony N. Morgan, speaks to media during a news conference at the agency's downtown Toronto offices, December 12, 2014. The ACLC was responding to a Toronto Star investigation into the disproportionate number of black kids in foster and group home care.

Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star

By: Laurie Monsebraaten Social justice reporter, Published on Sat Dec 13 2014

The “alarming” numbers of black children in foster and group home care mean the African Canadian community needs its own children’s aid society, say leaders in Toronto’s black community.

“We have seen this successfully implemented in other communities,” said Anthony Morgan of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, noting there are already children’s aid societies serving Ontario’s Jewish, Catholic and aboriginal families.

The clinic has set up a working group of academics, social workers and community members to study the issue, he added.

The legal clinic was reacting to a Star story that showed 41 per cent of children in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto are black. Just 8 per cent of the city’s population under age 18 are black.

Black community leaders blame cultural misunderstandings, poverty and systemic racism in the child protection system as well as schools and police, the largest source of referrals to children’s aid.

“The guts of this lies in the question about anti-black racism,” said Ryerson University social work professor Akua Benjamin, referring to what she describes as the core of the problem.

“The establishment of an agency directed, developed and owned by the black community will have a real impact on these numbers,” added Benjamin, one of several leaders who spoke at a news conference at the legal clinic’s downtown office Friday.

Urgent action is needed because black families are being torn apart and too many black youths in care are ending up in the criminal justice system, she said.

In the meantime, the clinic is calling on the government to mandate the involvement of the black community whenever child protection workers respond to calls about the safety of any child of African or Caribbean heritage.

In these cases, every CAS should have a local list of “competent and proven” African Canadian organizations to assist, Morgan said.

“Of course we know there are times when a child does need to be apprehended,” he said.

“But in terms of the legitimacy of that decision, the appropriateness of that decision, and making sure that the rights and the dignity of the family and the child are upheld, we feel that roster needs to be developed and used — and supported by our governments,” he added.

When black children are brought into care, they should be placed with relatives or culturally appropriate foster families, Morgan said.

The clinic also wants the government to mandate all children’s aid societies to collect ethnic data on the children and families they serve and for the numbers to be regularly publicized on agency websites.

Source: Toronto Star

Almost half of Ontario's foster children are on psychotropic drugs. Nick Woolridge was put on drugs starting when he had a normal reaction to the bad news that he could not see his family for eight years. The drug calmed him down so he could not express his feelings.

This is part of a long chain of news articles and official reports all criticizing the use of psychotropic drugs, not to help children, but to control their behavior. And in spite of the criticism. the use of drugs only increases.

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Use of 'behaviour-altering' drugs widespread in foster, group homes

Almost half of children and youth in care aged 5 to 17 are on drugs, including tranquilizers and anticonvulsants, government-backed survey finds.

Nick Woolridge, who was taken into care just before his eighth birthday, says he was on so many behaviour-altering medications that he "can't remember half of them."

Jim Rankin / Toronto Star

By: Sandro Contenta News, Insight Laurie Monsebraaten, Social justice reporter Jim Rankin, Published on Fri Dec 12 2014

Nick Woolridge learned he would become a ward of the provincial government while sitting in the lobby of a children’s aid society office in Brantford. He was 10, and his reaction was swift.

“The lobby was destroyed within two seconds,” says Woolridge, now 20. “There were hangers flying and glass smashed.

“You don’t bring someone to a children’s aid society and say, ‘Oh, you’re not going back home until you’re 18.’ That’s hard for someone to deal with, especially when you’re 10,” he adds. “I didn’t understand why I wasn’t going home.”

It wasn’t the last place Woolridge would trash while in the care of the state. And it wasn’t long before he was placed on “behaviour-altering medications,” so many that he “can’t remember half of them.”

Woolridge isn’t alone.

Almost half of children and youth in foster and group home care aged 5 to 17 — 48.6 per cent — are on drugs, such as Ritalin, tranquilizers and anticonvulsants, according to a yearly survey conducted for the provincial government and the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS). At ages 16 and 17, fully 57 per cent are on these medications.

In group homes, the figure is even higher — an average of 64 per cent of children and youth are taking behaviour-altering drugs. For 10- to 15-year-olds, the number is a staggering 74 per cent.

The figures are found in “Looking After Children in Ontario,” a provincially mandated survey known as OnLAC. It collects data on the 7,000 children who have spent at least one year in care. After requests by the Star, the 2014 numbers were made public for the first time.

Top CAS officials describe the high number on “psychotropic or behaviour-altering medication” as a crisis.

“The medication problem is huge,” says Raymond Lemay, who retired this summer after 32 years as executive director of the Prescott-Russell children’s aid society. “It’s catastrophic.

“We should be doing other things than medicating these kids,” he says, adding his agency discourages the use of psychotropic drugs. “Medication is inappropriate in many circumstances and will do these kids long-term damage.”

Drugs can ease disruptive behaviour. But doctors and CAS officials are concerned that mental-health issues caused by trauma aren’t being addressed. Dosages at times are too high and long-term side effects, according to some experts, are poorly studied. A Star investigation in 2012 found 600 cases, reported to Health Canada during a 10-year period, of children and youth suffering serious side effects while on ADHD medication, including amnesia and suicide.

For youths in care, the rate of psychotropic drug use is significantly higher than the general population. A 2005 study in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry estimated that only 2.5 per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 19 were on psychotropic medication.

Children’s aid societies deal with children and youth who have higher levels of mental-health and behavioural problems than the general population. Still, there is evidence of a system using medication simply to keep children and youth under control.

“I don’t think doctors out there are trying to zombie kids as a goal,” says Dr. Ben Klein, medical director at the Lansdowne Children’s Centre in Brantford and a consultant with children’s aid societies. “The medication gets abused because the rest of the system doesn’t deal with the (mental-health) problem.”

Children’s aid societies tap into outside agencies for mental-health services. But long waiting lists often leave physicians treating traumatized or unruly children with few options. The result is what Dr. Burke Baird at McMaster University’s Child Advocacy and Assessment Program calls “a harm reduction model.”

“Why are these kids on medication? Because people are desperate to make them functional,” Baird says, and “there’s so little else to offer.

“If there was something I could do to make him a little less angry, a little less explosive, would that be worthwhile?” he adds, describing how medication can get prescribed.

A Toronto man in his early 20s, who spent 12 years as a Crown ward, believes medication was used as a “behaviour control method” in the Belleville group home where he lived with 15 other youths.

“I felt it was an excuse. I think it was just easier to manage that number of youth in one place if they weren’t all going so fast,” he says, referring to youths considered hyperactive.

He was placed on medication despite insisting he didn’t need it.

“I felt you really didn’t have a choice because if you refused to take your medication you’d be punished for that,” he says. “You’d be grounded and not allowed to join programs and interact with other youth.”

Andrew Koster, executive director of Brant Family and Children’s Services, notes that Ontario law requires informed consent for medical treatment from anyone capable of providing it, regardless of age. But concerns that youth will reject medication mean “their rights are not necessarily given to them.”

Ontario’s highly decentralized child-protection model — 46 private agencies funded largely by tax dollars — seems to make matters worse.

Only half of children’s aid societies have a prescribed way of assessing the mental health needs of children, and barely 15 per cent of these use methods recommended by the provincial government, according to a 2009 survey sponsored by OACAS, the lobby group representing the agencies.

The lack of standardization “likely means that many children in need are not identified and referred for treatment,” concludes the survey report, co-authored by Elisa Romano, professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa.

In 2009, the Ministry of Children and Youth Services issued a “best practices” report on the administration and monitoring of psychotropic drugs, but did not make them part of regulations governing child protection agencies.

Gissele Taraba of Brant Family and Children's Services, who is developing a guide on how children should be assessed and treated, says "kids in the system are taking too many medications." (Jim Rankin/Toronto Star)

JIM RANKIN/TORONTO STAR

The OACAS is now funding work by Gissele Taraba, a manager with the Brant and Oxford children’s aid societies, to develop a guide on how children should be assessed and treated.

“Kids in the system are taking too many medications,” she says flatly.

At the Brant CAS, drugs make up 52 per cent of expenditures on health insurance claims. The top five drugs prescribed and paid for by insurance are all used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), including Concerta, Strattera and Adderall.

Taraba describes child-welfare services — from education to mental health — as disconnected and blames the provincial government for the lack of integration.

“Where is the expectation from above in terms of us working together?” she says, challenging the government to take responsibility for the children legally in its care.

A soon-to-be-published report by Klein, Taraba and other child-welfare experts also warns of children who have symptoms of attention deficit disorder being misdiagnosed and given “unhelpful medications” for long periods. “The big question is, what are we treating?” Klein says.

Recent scientific studies, for example, have examined the impact on infants of “toxic stress,” caused by long periods of physical or emotional abuse. The prolonged release of stress hormones changes the wiring of the developing brain, causing long-term problems with learning and with controlling of emotions and impulses.

“We don’t call it brain damage but it is brain damage,” says Klein, who is also a clinical professor at McMaster University. “It’s like a baseball bat to the head.”

Something as common as a stern admonition from a teacher or foster parent can provoke a “flight or fight” response from children raised in threatening and unpredictable family environments.

“These kids become train wrecks in the system,” Klein says. “They burn through home placements and every time it’s another separation, it’s another trauma.”

Typically, these children get diagnosed with ADHD because they exhibit its symptoms, including inattention, hyperactivity and acting on impulse. They get placed on medication like Ritalin, whose side effects may include insomnia and appetite suppression. If the symptoms persist, the dosage might get boosted.

“There are definitely cases where kids are on egregious doses of, say, ADHD medications,” Klein says.

Medication might make them less likely to act out, Klein adds, but it doesn’t deal with the root cause of a child’s trauma. That requires “trauma-focused cognitive behaviour therapy,” which he says is almost impossible to access in Ontario.

Klein also calls for more services to support struggling families, noting that children in care often come from homes strained by poverty, substance abuse and mental-health troubles. Ontario implemented a mental health strategy in 2011, which boosted the number of mental health workers and served thousands more children. But experts say it isn’t nearly enough.

The 2014 OnLAC survey, prepared by the University of Ottawa’s Meagan Miller and Robert Flynn, found 32 per cent of wards aged 5 to 21 with ADHD, as reported by caregivers. (A 2007 study in the U.S. found 6 per cent of children in the general population, aged 2 to 17, diagnosed with ADHD. The last child health study conducted in Ontario, in 1983, found 9 per cent of children with ADHD. A new study is underway.)

In an earlier OnLAC study, Miller and Flynn found more than 50 per cent of youths in care at “high risk for a likely psychiatric disorder,” compared to 17 per cent of the general youth population in the U.S.

Klein wasn’t surprised by Woolridge’s violent reaction to being made a ward.

“That’s the flight-or-fight response,” he says. “In his brain, it’s as if he’s being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. It’s flooding stress chemicals. It’s a tantrum. He’s not in control.”

Woolridge was taken into care a month before his eighth birthday. He was bounced from foster homes to group homes — a dizzying 22 different homes during 10 years in care.

“I had a lot of anger issues due to my past, and dealing with my family,” he says. “And, growing up in foster homes and group homes, my anger just kept getting worse.”

A recent study co-authored by researchers at the Child Welfare Institute of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto found that poor parenting in foster homes partly accounts for higher levels of behaviour problems in some children.

Nick Woolridge is pictured at a Brant Family and Children's Services building, where staff viewed an LGBT video produced by Woolridge and other youth.

Jim Rankin/Toronto Star

During visits with his grandmother, Woolridge noticed she patiently found ways to defuse his outbursts and calm him down. Foster parents rarely tried doing so, and Woolridge says the Brant CAS too easily acquiesced to bouncing him around.

“I don’t think it’s right for a kid growing up in CAS to be shipped from foster home to foster home,” he says.

Woolridge spent time in a mental-health treatment centre and participated in what he describes as countless anger-management programs. He suffered from depression and anxiety. At times, he harmed himself, once with an overdose of the many medications he was on. A year ago, he decided to stop taking them.

Despite his ordeal, he credits the Brant children’s aid society with helping him turn his life around. He’s now on an Extended Care and Maintenance Agreement, which continues to support youths after they turn 18, the age when they must leave care. He lives on his own in a rented room, helps Brant train foster parents, plans to get his high school diploma and eventually go to college.

“I want to be like — I was going to say a normal person who has their own house and a family and a nice job,” he says, sitting on the bed in his small room. “I want the whole nine yards, I guess.”

On his bedroom wall hangs a sign: “Just because the past didn’t turn out like you wanted it doesn’t mean your future can’t be better than you ever imagined.” He’s not sure he fully believes that, but he’s working at it.

The reporters on this story can be reached at children@thestar.ca .

Source: Toronto Star

Columnist Edward Keenan suggests making it harder to snatch a child. He includes one factual error:

Of course, punishment isn’t the aim of children’s aid societies when they remove children from their homes, but it certainly is the effect on parents. It appears to be punishing in the effect it has on many children, too.

In many Dufferin cases power-tripping social workers met privately with families and explained in no uncertain terms that their objective was not to provide help, but to ruin the family.

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Losing a child to CAS should be much harder: Keenan

Why apply a much lower burden of evidence to removing children from their parents than to convicting people of criminal behaviour?

By: Edward Keenan Columnist, Published on Fri Dec 12 2014

I would far prefer to be sent to jail than to have my children permanently taken away from me.

I suspect most parents would agree that losing their kids is among the very worst punishments to which they could imagine being subjected, a fate worse than prison.

But an ongoing series of investigative stories about Ontario’s child protection system in the Star reveals we apply a much lower burden of evidence to removing children from their parents than we do to convicting people of criminal behaviour — even though the consequences are in many cases so much more severe.

For instance, Sandro Contenta and Jim Rankin reported on a case in which a couple had their children removed from their home, without being able to call any witnesses or contest the evidence offered against them, without any trial at all. The summary judgment highlighted the fact that the parents were facing criminal charges. Those charges were dropped months later — and the parents insist they were baseless to begin with — but their children remain in foster care three years later.

Rachel Mendleson reported on a case in which a woman’s children were taken away — and kept away — largely on the strength of hair lab tests showing she used cocaine. The type of testing used as evidence in her child protection case has recently been rejected by a court in a criminal case. A judge ruled you can’t be sent to jail on the strength of those tests. But those tests are the one major piece of evidence that mean Christine Rupert will likely never see her two daughters again.

Of course, punishment isn’t the aim of children’s aid societies when they remove children from their homes, but it certainly is the effect on parents. It appears to be punishing in the effect it has on many children, too.

Children seized from their parents very often face dire outcomes in their lives. About half of Crown wards, as they’re called, drop out of high school. The Star reports that 20 per cent of them change homes more than three times (some changing homes more than 60 times), and an outright majority have changed schools more than three times. An earlier report I read at TVO claimed that 68 per cent of homeless youth come from group homes, foster homes or youth centres.

McGill University researcher Nico Trocmé, a leading expert on child protection studies, sums it up: “We don’t know whether we’re doing more harm than good.”

It’s important to acknowledge that in many cases child welfare advocates investigate, they face a choice between very poor options: Leaving children in the care of apparently negligent parents, versus traumatizing them (and the parents) by ripping apart a family and putting the children into a system where they may fare no better.

But given the near-certainty of the disruptive and harshly punitive effects on all parties of removing children from their parents’ care, the standard for doing so should be high — near the levels of certainty of harm we expect as evidence in criminal cases. That’s not the case.

Child protection workers say that beginning in the 1990s the philosophy began to lean heavily towards taking children from their families. When they try to prioritize keeping families together, they are accused of “mandate drift.”

Only a quarter of children taken into care have suffered physical or sexual abuse — the kind of extreme cases most would agree demand harsh intervention. The remainder include cases of neglect — including the perceived risk of harm due to lack of supervision, and “maltreatment” by not having enough food in a home, not changing diapers, or not having appropriate clothing for the season. Substance abuse by parents seems to be a significant factor in many cases. Almost a third of cases involve parents on social assistance.

What many situations appear to call out for most is help: instruction or counselling in parenting and life skills, or more income support. Even in the absence of those, it’s hard to confidently say most children involved are better off removed from their families than they would otherwise be. It’s hard to stand by and do nothing when you see a child at risk, but it’s possible it may sometimes be the best of a range of bad options.

The situation is all the more disturbing because the list of risk factors considered by aid workers seems systematically tilted to further punish the poor, and some specific cultural groups. Inadequate living arrangements and income appear in reports as significant risk factors. The Star reported that First Nations children are 9.3 times more likely than average to be in care. Black children, who represent only 8 per cent of the Toronto child population, make up 41 per cent of the children in care.

Taken together, this system appears to be a well-intentioned disgrace that often actively ruins the lives of parents and children who are struggling. Indeed, it appears to punish them because they are struggling. The stories suggest an appalling lack of measurable standards, little gathering or use of evidence, and a patchwork of agencies using different methods with little coherent central oversight.

In law, the provincial government is the parent of children who are taken away from their families. In the process it uses to do so, and the effects it produces, it appears to be a neglectful and sometimes abusive parent. A parent exposing those it is responsible for to considerable harm. It’s a situation that cries out for intervention.

Edward Keenan is a Star columnist.

Source: Toronto Star