FN Caring Society shares strategy to help improve Aboriginal child care
Foster-care concerns a poignant reminder of residential schools; Speaker draws the parallel at child-abuse prevention event - Scott Paradis - Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The strain residential schools put on Aboriginal communities in the past is echoed today in foster care services, a representative for an Aboriginal child and family group said Monday. Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada, was the keynote speaker at the Timmins Native Friendship Centre Monday, for this year's purple ribbon campaign.
The ribbon campaign marks the 14th annual Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention and Awareness Month, held each year in October.
"In 1949, at the height of the government's use of residential schools, there were 9,000 children taken from their homes," Blackstock said.
"Our best estimate is there are now between 23,000 and 28,000 children away from their homes and in foster care."
Of that number, about 9,000 Aboriginal children in foster care are from First Nation communities, she said.
Blackstock has done the math and said in 2004, children "from the reserve spent collectively two million nights away from home."
There are four main reasons for children, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, being taken from their families and placed into foster care, she said.
They are: Physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse and neglect. Non-Aboriginal children are usually taken from their homes because of the three abuses, However, Aboriginal children are commonly taken away because of neglect, she said.
"When people think neglect, they think the parents don't have the right parenting skills," she said.
However, Blackstock said, studies her group is involved with show that parenting skills have little to do with the so-called neglect problem.
"It has more to do with poverty and a lack of access to social programs," she said.
Blackstock said she could teach parenting skills to almost any parent - but without money, they likely couldn't benefit from them. "You can give them the recipe, but they can't make anything without the groceries," she said.
Blackstock said she doesn't live in a "utopian world," and understands that some children are better off away from home.
That fact doesn't excuse the excessive numbers of children being taken away from their families, she said.
The First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada developed a method for average Canadians to help improve Aboriginal child care, and Blackstock said it takes less than 15 minutes.
Details of the 15-minute program are available on the group's website, www.fncaringsociety.com
This year's purple ribbon campaign is the first time Child and Family Services Timmins and District has partnered with the Timmins Native Friendship Center.
Richard Lambert-Belanger, executive director of Child and Family Services Timmins and District, said he has high hopes for the partnership and hopes to see it continue in future campaigns.
Groups have just begun handing out the purple ribbons, and on one blitz alone auxiliary members of the OPP and Timmins Police Service handed out 3,000 of them.
"It wasn't a fundraiser," Lambert-Belanger said. "But people donated anyway and we raised more than $1,000."
As for the purple ribbon itself, he calls it "a symbolic beacon," and hopes people wear it throughout the entire month of October, not just the day they receive it.