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NOT SAFE, NOT SOUND - Is a change in the child welfare system failing Manitoba's native kids?
Allison Hanes, National Post
Published: Saturday, October 06, 2007

The safety of a five-year-old girl on a northern Manitoba reserve has ignited debate this week about the vigilance of the province's child welfare system where foul play, abuse and extreme neglect have already led to the deaths of eight youngsters in care in the past four years.

The latest case involves a shy little girl who has endured more than her share of tragedy. In July her father was fatally hit in the head with a two-by-four -- a beating she may have witnessed. Her 16-year-old half-brother is one of the people charged with the murder. The girl may also have been sexually assaulted at age three. Another older half-brother, then 17, was suspected but not charged. The child has grown up in an impoverished household where drug and alcohol addiction were rife.

But when her aunt in Winnipeg, who is not Aboriginal, demanded the child be removed from this environment, she found herself locked in a three-month battle against bureaucratic resistance, ironclad confidentiality and cultural hostility. She was accused of racism and exploiting her niece for daring to question the motives of a system focused on maintaining the ties of First Nations youth to their communities.

Kim Edwards holds her only photo of Phoenix Sinclair, whom she cared for until the little girl was returned to her biological mother. The mother and stepfather are now charged in the five-year-old's death. - Mike Aporius, Winnipeg Free Press

Welfare officials have investigated the case and decided the girl was safe and should remain with her mother under the watchful eye of local child protection authorities.

Manitoba's Minister of Family Services and the province's Child Advocate took the rare step of speaking out despite strict privacy laws to reassure the aunt about the child's well-being.

And Marcel Balfour, the chief of Norway House Cree Nation, a reserve of about 5,000 where the girl lives, also insisted she is in good hands.

"All I can say is that the child is safe," he said. "I am more than confident, in terms of the processes that are in place, in terms of putting all the issues into context -- including these allegations that would have necessarily have to have been looked into-- that the child is safe."

"And I stand by the decision of the local childcare agency," the chief added.

But the aunt remains skeptical that a system that has already failed eight children will adequately protect her niece.

"They're stepping up and saying they will take responsibility at this point as a system, and they will do what they can to ensure her safety, so if anything happens to her, it's on their heads," said the aunt, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the girl.

"I said to them: 'Not one of you would put your children in that home. Let's pack their backpack and stick them in their overnight. You're not going to do that, are you? Not one of you will tell me you would let your children sleep in [that] house -- why do you think [my niece] should stay there?' "

The case has once again put the spotlight on a system where the welfare of the child is sometimes superseded by cultural considerations.

The Winnipeg woman first learned the heartbreaking details of her five-year-old niece's young life as her brother lay comatose in hospital in July.

Friends who came to pay their respects to the dying man told his sister in whispers that her brother was likely attacked for trying to rescue his daughter from a horrendously dysfunctional family life.

The woman said her brother was "no angel." In fact, the siblings had not spoken in years because of her disdain for the musician's hard-partying, booze-and drug-fuelled lifestyle.

She knew that he had moved up to Norway House, was living with a Cree woman and her four children and had a young daughter.

What she was told later by his friends was that her brother had been trying to turn his life around after the possibility surfaced that his daughter may have been sexually assaulted.

He took the girl to nearby Thompson, and it was upon a return visit to his estranged wife's home that he was attacked, burned with cigarettes and left unconscious on a couch for up to 12 hours before help was sought. His injuries were so severe he was immediately airlifted to Winnipeg.

As life support was disconnected, his sister vowed to do everything she could to rescue her niece from the cycle of violence and addiction that claimed her brother -- which in her mind meant taking the girl far from home.

"Any access right now to her family is probably not a good idea. It should all be supervised and I just don't believe the system up there can regulate that and take care of her," the aunt said.

However, Billie Schibler, the province's Child Advocate, said her office has checked into the matter and is satisfied proper procedures are in place.

Although it took three months for the aunt to get answers, that does not mean nothing was being done in that time, she said.

While the aunt's concerns for the girl may be genuine, Mr. Balfour said the community resents the implication it is not putting the child's safety first or is incapable of looking after her.

"We should be able to look after our own and not have our children leave us, but we should also be putting them in healthy homes where there is adequate response, whether it's foster care in First Nations communities or whatever," he said.

Stuart Briese, the provincial Conservative party's child and family services critic, raised the case during Question Period in the Manitoba legislature this week.

"No one should have to fight this hard for a child's safety," he said.

Manitoba's child welfare system has been under scrutiny since 2003, when the province's single service "devolved" into four separate agencies: two for Aboriginals, one of Metis and one for the rest of the province's children.

At least in part, the rationale was to ensure that at-risk children maintain a crucial link with their heritage and their communities -- a philosophy aimed at avoiding a repeat of such past mistakes as the residential school policy or what the Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Phil Fontaine once described as the "cultural genocide" of adoption into non-Aboriginal homes.

However, eight children have died while in care in four years. Most recently, two-year-old Gage Guimond was killed in July when he was plucked from a loving foster family and "reunited" with a great-aunt who is now facing manslaughter charges.

Before him, five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair was killed after being taken from foster care and returned to family members who are now charged in her death. She was abused, killed and dumped in the woods three months after child services closed her file. In 2005, two-year-old Heaven Traverse suffered fatal injuries

while in a foster home on the Peguis First Nation community.

Earlier this year, a provincial auditor-general's report found a range of weaknesses in Manitoba's child welfare system in the wake of the devolution.

Records were not up to date and a central information-sharing system was not accurate or complete. Children still in care were listed as no longer being in the system. Cases were filed with the wrong agency. Foster homes were operating with expired licences and one in 10 reviewed for the audit had no criminal background check on file.

Rusty Beardy, lead negotiator on child and family for the Manitoba Keewatinook Ininew Okimowin, the northern chief 's authority in the province, said the majority of youngsters in the province's child welfare system come from Aboriginal communities and that the root cause of the problem is poverty.

Safety of the child should always be paramount, he said, but heritage is a huge component of a First Nations child's well-being.

"As much as possible, they try to retain familiarity with a child's knowledge of culture and language," he said.

"I think every effort is being made by the First Nations agencies to ensure that these children remain in their communities, but you have to remember: A lot of these communities don't have the resources -- [they] have a difficult enough time looking after their own children.

"So sometimes some agencies have to resort to putting kids elsewhere, but the priority is that if they're going to be removed from the community it's going to be another First Nations community, [and] that they go and stay in and with First Nations families."

Mr. Balfour said he was part of the " '60s scoop," where Aboriginal children were randomly plucked from their communities and placed with non-Aboriginal families.

That legacy and the residential schools morass is largely responsible for the high rate of First Nations youngsters in care today, he said -- and precisely why keeping at-risk children close to home and working with their families is so crucial.

"It's decades of coming to the situation where we are at right now where proper parenting skills have not necessarily been taught," Mr. Balfour said. "And I don't want to use this yet again as an excuse, but certainly I want to use it as an explanation, in terms of the impact of residential schools.

"If you, at the beginning, scoop up people, throw them into schools and then let them out after a while and expect them to be parent ? [it] becomes a problem when we start to talk about what is proper parenting.

From a First Nations point of view, not only is it the parenting, it's part of the larger familial relationships and the community as well.

"To have people repatriated and have people stay within the community, is not only important for the individual child, but for the family and the community as a whole."

But Peter Markesteyn, Manitoba's former chief medical examiner who is now a consultant in forensic pathology, said that unfortunately questions of safety are sometimes obscured by other concerns.

"It is of course imperative to consider the child's safety above all other consideration, whether cultural, ethnic and/or religious. That seems so obvious that one wonders why that should be an issue at all in case management," Dr. Markesteyn said in an e-mail. "These are judgment calls. The workers need a clear understanding of the need to utilize the tools of risk management. These tools exist but, I am told, are not always used."

Mr. Briese said that while no one is philosophically opposed to the devolution, it happened too fast.

Instead of reducing the number of children in care, the ranks have swelled to more than 7,000 children, and case workers have insurmountable loads.

"There are some that literally fall through the cracks," he said. "I'm trying as a critic to get as many assurances out of the Minister that the safety of the children comes first, before all other considerations."

Paul Whitehead, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario who has studied child welfare in First Nations communities, said there are two fundamental issues at play when it comes to native-run systems.

One is the objectivity of case workers.

"Because remember, the child welfare workers in those cases are the friends, the neighbours, the aunts and the cousins [of those] whose home is being investigated," he said.

The other issue pertains to the evaluation of risk, which Prof. Whitehead hypothesized might be different for someone intimately familiar with a community's problems than for an outsider.

"Why? Because the rates of all kinds of social problems are so much greater: alcoholism sometimes affecting 30 or 40% of the adult population; a high proportion of the population having had involvement with the law," he said. "And so from the point of view of people who are part of that culture and part of that society, they may not see some situations as risky as we might off-reserve."

Michael Boyes, a child psychologist at the University of Calgary, said there is very compelling research that shows First Nations children who have strong ties to their cultures show less risk of a range of social ills in the long run, especially suicide.

"So when we go back to the child welfare question and ask: 'Are we playing with fire by letting this happen?' Well I think those things are being put into place for reasons that are also very important when we look at suicide rates and things like that," Dr. Boyes said.

"It's unfortunate that when we say, 'Where's the balance?' -- which is the ultimate question -- we're never going to be comfortable with a balance because a bad outcome is a bad outcome.

"The reality is that it's an ongoing issue of tension."

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CHILD VICTIMS

Some of the children who have died in the care of child services in Manitoba since 2003:

Gage Guimond, two, (above) died in July after he was taken from a stable foster home and placed with a great-aunt who is now charged with manslaughter in his death. A 911 call was made saying he had fallen down the stairs, but it was later alleged he was covered in bruises that predated the supposed tumble.

Venecia Audy, three, died in August, 2006. Her mother and stepfather are facing charges in her death. She had a child services case file but had not had any contact with the agency the year before her death. Phoenix Sinclair, five, (at right) was in and out of foster care all her life. She was found dead at Fisher River Cree Nation in 2006, three months after her case file was closed. The girl was dead for nine months before anyone discovered she was missing. Her mother and stepfather are charged in her death.

Heaven Traverse, two, died in January, 2005, as a result of head injuries sustained in a foster home on the Peguis First Nation. Her foster parents were charged with assault in her death. Patsy Desmarais, four, died after she was slammed down on a hotel room bed and hit her head on the wall in July, 2004. Child welfare was involved with the family. Her mother's boyfriend, who was babysitting at the time, was convicted of manslaughter in 2006. In May, 2004, a 16-month-old girl died after suffering a severe beating at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. The mother pleaded guilty to negligence for leaving the baby for two days with broken ribs, a skull fracture and cuts and bruises. Both mother, aged 15, and child were active child welfare cases.

National Post