by Pieta Woolley - Tyee Solutions Society

Transcription

Fostering Truth
Breaking the Link Between Foster Care and Youth Homelessness
by Pieta Woolley
a tyee solutions society series
Fostering Truth
No Easy Answers 1
For foster care kids, the roses and thorns of BC’s budget
3
Near Daily, a Child Dies or Is Hurt in Care of Province
5
Coming child and youth watchdog report follows on
years of deaths and injury in care
9
McJobs, a Launch Pad for Young Workers
Less than half of BC teens in crisis get needed
mental health care: watchdog 15
16
23
Gutsy MLAs Requires to Fix ‘Crazy’ Foster Care System, Says Prof 27
30
For Residential School Kids, a Legacy of Sex Abuse 57
29
60
BC parents support extending foster care from 19 to 21: survey
Where We Go from Here
Foster Care System Touches One in 20 British Columbians 26
When Foster Care Hurts
52
Fostering Truth: Uncovering Life Experiences
Lessons for BC in Florida’s foster care vote? 22
BC lags behind US, UK on extended foster care
40
First Strokes of Justice at Reconciliation Hearings
20
The Foster Care Discussion BC Politicians Ignore
Lost: Low-skill, Decent-pay, ‘Entry’ Jobs
Why Efforts to ‘Fix’ Floundering Youth Fail 48
‘Aging Out’: Tough Road for Teens Too Old to Be ‘In Care’ 11
Leaders silent on BC’s foster care mess
Can Public Service Kickstart Canada’s Young and Jobless? 35
When Family Fails, Schools Can Do More to Care for Youth44
Inequity in Crown funding for kids on reserve,
human rights tribunal hears 10
Foster Kids’ Long Wait for Mental Health Care
Vancouver Island University waives tuition fees for
former government wards 34
63
64
72
Pieta Woolley reports on solutions to breaking the link between foster
care and youth homelessness for Tyee Solutions Society. This series was
produced by Tyee Solutions Society in collaboration with Tides Canada
Initiatives (TCI), with funding from the Vancouver Foundation. TCI
and the Vancouver Foundation neither influence nor endorse the
particular content of TSS’ reporting. Other publications wishing to
publish this story or other Tyee Solutions Society-produced articles,
please visit http://tyeesolutions.org.
No Easy Answers
A reporter reflects on a year investigating the link between foster care and youth homelessness
My goal for this project was threefold: to investigate why foster care
seems so tied to youth homeless (about 40 per cent of street-involved
youth tell researchers they spent time in care); to highlight best
practices and potential solutions to breaking that connection; and to
tell the stories of some youth who have experienced both state care and
homelessness.
For this, I spent the first two months of the project just meeting with
various people: youth living on the streets; foster families; social
workers, both working and retired; youth outreach workers; academics;
nonprofit administrators; teachers; moms with kids in the system;
members of the ‘Richer table ’— a broad working group of professionals
in health, social services, community centres, youth work, foster care,
and other areas, who meet weekly ato Ray-Cam Community Centre
(in the DTES) to improve carethe delivery of care to children, youth
and families living on the margins; and grandmas who take care of
their grandchildren, both in and out of the system. I also read books
— mostly American, though a few Canadian — about aging out of the
system.
I didn’t write at all, those first two months. In my earlier efforts to
cover foster care, I had become somewhat aware of how complex the
government system is, and how silenced the families who encounter the
system are. I wanted to unwind both of these for myself, before I tried
to tackle the problem of aging out in print.
When I was ready, I broke the subject up into a few chunks. The three
first articles investigated the big systemic problems: aging out at 19 with
little support; the lack of mental health and psychiatric assessments
and supports for children and youth in the system; and the system’s
struggles to support the people who do most of the actual care of kids
who are struggling in B.C., grandparents. Next I looked at an American
solution: litigation. As September marked the start of a new school
year, I did a series of stories about the new ways that today’s economy
has undermined the transition from classroom to workplace for foster
kids as well as other vulnerable kids, examining both educational
and employment failure and pilot solutions. Last, I took up the
disproportionate presence of aboriginal kids in foster care and among
homeless youth, writing about the future of care as an essential part
of Canada’s reconciliation process with aboriginal people. Alongside
these elements, editor Chris Wood and I worked with students from
the Vancouver Film School to create an internet microsite and short
animated web video, that told composite stories of several youth
alongside other content tailored to a digital generation audience.
Here are some last thoughts:
1. Outcomes data to show how different approaches work is virtually
non-existent in Canada. The US does a better job of collecting data.
To me, this is the number-one strategic problem with asking for
policy change. If we don’t know the effect of current policy, how do
we know what needs to be changed, or if those changes work?
2. Improving the state system for youth aged 19 to 24 is an immediate
concern, and policy solutions can be found across B.C. the United
States and internationally.
3. The connection between former foster youth and the street is often
tied up with earlier trauma; parental poverty, mental health and
addictions (and for many the continuing effects of the residential
school experience); disability or brain injury such as Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome; and other factors.
Fostering Truth: Breaking the Link Between Foster Care and Youth Homelessness
2
I am frankly worried that youth who reach 19 or 24 with serious
ongoing impediments (trauma, disease, criminality, low literacy,
addiction), and I believe this represents the majority, are being lost
amid the noise generated by programs aimed at the “creème de la
creème” of foster kids—those with the fewest scars—programs such
as free tuition at UBC and VIU, the new Katmavik-led foster youth
program, and others. There’s a bulk of such services for clean, sober,
nondangerous fragile kids, but a dearth of much less glamourous
addictions treatment and recovery support, mental health assessment, and support to people with disability.
in-care and not-yet-in-care, from becoming tomorrow’s homeless?
4. Vulnerable kids who are able to stay with family do better than
youth that are removed from family. I wish more attention were
paid to supporting families — immediate and extended — in the
conversation about youth transitions and youth outcomes. One statistic was unable to verify suggested that after the state steps out of
the picture, 80 per cent of youth in care move back with their family
of origin. Family of origin is a really, really important piece of this
puzzle.
Conclusion
To break the connection between foster care and youth homelessness, I
believe the focus should be broadened.
First, keep investigating and proposing policy solutions for the pressing
trajectory of kids coming out of care, including those on youth
agreements, and in the youth criminal justice system, and onto the
street.
Second, extend that same kind of investigation to the pipeline of kids
entering the care system, the youth agreement system, and encountering
the child protection system: a population that includes as many as one
in 15 B.C. kids each year. Why must the state intervene in so many
families? Can parents and grandparents get adequate support? What’s
working? And what must be changed now to prevent today’s youth,
Pieta Woolley, Tyee Solutions Soceity
For foster care kids, the roses and
thorns of BC’s budget
For the 40 per cent of teens in the province who age out of foster care at
19 and hit the streets, what the B.C. Budget 2013 gives, the B.C. Budget
2013 taketh away.
First, the goods:
The ministry that cares for vulnerable kids — on all citizens’ behalf —
is the Ministry for Children and Family Development. Buried in the
budget’s service plan is the following statement, promising to provide
more (and better?) services to youth aging out of the system:
“[The ministry will] develop and expand Post-Majority Services and
Supports in collaboration with other ministries, non-governmental
organizations, educational institutions, and the private sector to better
support young adults transitioning from care or youth agreements [at 19]
up to age 24.”
What that may mean, exactly, is not laid out in the service plan.
A focus on “post-majority services,” as it’s called in bureaucratic circles,
is hot. One of George W. Bush’s last acts as U.S. president in 2008 was to
extend foster care support three years, to age 21 — though states may opt
to exit youth earlier. It was part of his Fostering Connections to Success and
Increasing Adoptions Act – a generally well-received piece of legislation
among family support groups.
Meanwhile, in B.C. the ministry’s government-appointed watchdog,
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, has been waiting since last spring to have her
mandate expanded to include the 19- to 24-year-olds who have aged out
of the system (see page 16 here).
On the other hand
Among teens who are wards of B.C. (ie. we are all their collective
parents), 42 per cent have a diagnosed disability (see page 19 here).
As has been reported elsewhere, on Feb. 20 NDP leader Adrian Dix called
the government out on its budgetary shunning of adults with disabilities.
For those receiving services under the personal supports initiative,
including adults with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, for example, support has
been reduced by one-third, the Times Colonist reported.
In addition, support for 19 year-olds with disabilities as they age out of
the foster care system are profoundly miserly, according to Jane Dyson,
the executive director of the B.C. Coalition of Persons with Disabilities.
Dyson is sending a letter this week to the leaders of the four main parties
running in the upcoming provincial election, asking for specific measures
to improve the lives of people living with disabilities — including young
adults.
“The $906 they get a month is inadequate,” she told The Tyee, pointing
out the connection between foster care, disability and the street.
“It means many people with disabilities end up couch-surfing, living in
shelters, constantly at-risk of homelessness, or homeless. I’ve met with
every minister of social development since the Liberals came in. We ask
for an increase, they say there’s no money.”
The coalition is asking for an increase in assistance to $1,200 a month,
a province-wide poverty reduction plan, and a restoration of funding
First Published February 21st, 2013
to Community Living B.C., the Crown agency that funds adult group
homes, day programs, and other supports.
4
Near Daily, a Child Dies or Is
Hurt in Care of Province
Reports reveal unbroken toll of tragedy among children and youth.
Agency. Over the same period, there were 1,136 critical injuries. (At any
given time, approximately 10,000 B.C. kids are in care.)
About every four days, in other words, a child or youth in the care of
B.C. dies (including those who have received services within the last
year). And at least every two days, one is critically injured. Kids and
teens in care are about four times more likely to die than other B.C.
young people, according to another public report.
‘Miscommunication, ineffective case management and passive responses’ from
authorities led up to deaths of Schoenborn children at hands of their father.
Today, a child or youth in or recently released from the care of the
Crown in B.C. is likely to die or be “critically injured.”
That chilling conclusion is unavoidable after reviewing a succession of
easily available public reports.
Between June 2007 and September 2012, according to B.C.’s
Representative for Children and Youth, 504 children and
youth perished while receiving care. Some were in foster care; others
were receiving or had recently received services from the Ministry of
Children and Family Development (MCFD), or a Delegated Aboriginal
Sometime this month, B.C.’s current representative for children and
youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, will release her latest report — the
last before the provincial election. It will detail the critical injuries and
deaths that happened in care in the fall and winter of 2012. It is expected
to report no break in the decades-long toll of tragedies.
Stretching from the 1992 inquiry into Matthew Vaudreuil’s untimely
death, through the 2002 death of Sherry Charlie, to the case of a child
heinously abused in care reported by Turpel-Lafond last month, the
reading is grim. Yet these “incidents” are among the few opportunities
the public gets to assess the services delivered by the Ministry of
Children and Families. Privacy legislation usually protects individual
case files.
First published March 11th, 2013
Who is dying, and why?
A report prepared by the Provincial Health Officer and Child and Youth
Officer for B.C. asserted in 2006 that, “About 30 per cent of the in-care
deaths were due to congenital anomalies, nervous system diseases and
childhood cancer — conditions that have not been highly amenable to
prevention.” The Ministry of Children and Families maintains the true
proportion of such “natural cause” deaths is closer to half.
Of those who died in 2012, for example, 33 perished for “natural”
reasons, while 24 were accident-related, suicides, homicides, and
undetermined deaths, according to the ministry website. In 2011, 46 of
79 deaths were “natural.”
That many such deaths happen among the young and disabled was
echoed in an email to The Tyee from the B.C. Coroner’s office: “Many of
the children who die while receiving support from MCFD are supported
through the Ministry’s ‘At Home Program,’ described on the Ministry
website as designed to ‘assist parents with some of the extraordinary
costs of caring for a child with severe disabilities at home through a
range of health supports and services.’”
Those deaths are reviewed in-house by MCFD. Summaries of the
reviews can be found here.
Of the 40 kids and teens who died during the summer of 2012, 11 cases
were also designated for further review by the B.C. Representative for
Children and Youth (decisions are pending on whether three additional
cases will be reviewed, according to the report).
Nonetheless, many deaths occurred while the victims were in the charge
of a government department with a legacy of crucial errors.
The one that many will recall occurred 21 years ago. Matthew Vaudreuil
died in 1992, while the NDP was in power in B.C. His horrific injuries
sparked the Gove Inquiry into Child Protection in B.C. It reported that
Matthew, “nearly six years old at the time of his death, weighed only 36
6
pounds. His face, arms, legs and back were covered in bruises. There
were what appeared to be rope burns on his shoulders and wrists, as if
he had been bound. Matthew had been tortured and deprived of food
before he was killed.”
At the time, the inquiry also found: “The response by ministry social
workers to every report of concern for Matthew’s safety was inadequate.”
Sherry Charlie died a decade later in 2002. By then the Liberal Party was
in power in B.C. Sherry was beaten to death at 19 months old by her
great uncle to whom she had been entrusted by a delegated agency. Her
story motivated the Hughes Review.
Turpel-Lafond has written several reports detailing other deaths since
2007.
From a 2008 report on the death of Amanda Simpson, age five:
“Examination at the hospital in Prince George revealed that Amanda
had a severe skull fracture with associated bleeding in the brain. Some
of the injuries were consistent with shaking. For example, there was
bleeding in both retinas and the optic nerve sheath. Amanda also had
a fractured collarbone and severe abdominal injuries consistent with
blunt force trauma. There were numerous bruises on her body.”
The report also notes that “During this period, the North region of
the Ministry was experiencing significant human resource challenges.
There was a high annual staff attrition rate. In the second half of 1998,
21 child protection, resource and guardianship workers had been hired.
By October 1999, 10 of those staff had resigned. Only 161 of the 222
staff positions for child protection, resource and guardianship worker
positions were filled. Approximately 30 per cent of those workers had
less than two years experience. In seven offices in the North region less
than half the staff were permanent. Temporary workers filled some
positions, while other positions were left vacant.”
7
while in the care of a court-approved relative. “In this case,” that report
says, “many plans were made. Few were carried through. Sixteen social
workers touched this case before the infant’s death, as did lawyers and
the family court. Eleven different placement decisions for the infant’s
care were made over a four-month period, ranging from the infant
being cared for by various different relatives to the infant being brought
into the legal care of the ministry.
“Most of these decisions were later abandoned. The infant’s file was
transferred between MCFD and the DAA (Delegated Aboriginal
Authority) five times. Generally speaking, interventions were episodic,
and there was an overall failure to see the big picture.”
Another report that same year, Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems:
Strengthening Supports for Vulnerable Infants, reviewed 21 infant
deaths that had occurred between 2007 and 2010.
Forty deaths over 120 days in 2012: roughly one every three days.
A report the next year was titled, Honouring Christian Lee. No Private
Matter: Protecting Children Living with Domestic Violence. It detailed
how Christian Lee died at six in a murder-suicide at the hand of his
father.
It also reported that, “MCFD took the approach that because Christian
was with his mother and his father was not living at home, the boy
was safe from physical harm. Ministry staff concluded his mother was
willing and able to protect him. While this approach reflects the way
our child protection legislation is structured, it does not allow for a
full recognition of the dynamics at play in domestic violence cases.
Christian was not safe because his mother was not safe. She was an
immigrant depending on her abusive husband to explain the social
service and legal systems in British Columbia, and she had limited
confidence in her ability to express herself in English.”
A 2011 report, So Many Plans, So Little Stability: A Child’s Need for
Security, tells the story of a four-month-old infant who died, again
The families of these victims, it found, “were known to have been facing
significant life and parenting challenges, yet somehow the risks to their
children associated with these challenges were ignored or not dealt with
effectively. Too often … professionals from the public health, medical
and child welfare systems saw these families and noted part of the issue,
but didn’t connect the dots to create a whole picture that would have
clearly revealed a fragile situation where intervention and additional
supports were critically necessary.”
A year ago, in March 2012, Honouring Kaitlynne, Max and Cordon:
Make their Voices Heard Now identified a series of failures in the
months leading up to the murder of three children, ages five to 10, at the
hands of their father, Allan Shoenborn.
Schoenborn had had numerous violent outbursts and encounters with
police before one in 2007, “began an escalating year-long involvement
with the criminal justice system, the child protection system and
others. This year was marked by domestic violence incidents, violent
or threatening confrontations involving Schoenborn and others,
miscommunication among the various systems, ineffective case
management, and passive responses by those charged with protecting
the mother and children. In the week leading up to the children’s deaths,
Schoenborn was arrested three times. The escalation ended with the
deaths of three children.”
Then just last month, yet another report, this time titled Who Protected
Him? How B.C.’s Child Welfare System Failed One of its Most
Vulnerable Children, told how police tasered an unnamed 11-year-old
boy in a group home, causing him “critical” injury. “Shortly after taking
the child into care as a two-year-old, the ministry placed him in a foster
home, where he again suffered physical and emotional abuse and neglect
for more than three years,” this report recounted.
“The ministry later failed to follow through on a potential adoption
opportunity for the boy. Instead, inexplicably, the seven-year-old child
was returned to his mother — from whose care he’d been removed five
years earlier — even though there was no evidence to suggest that her
ability to parent had improved.
“Rather than follow the advice of professionals who recommended
that the child be placed in a supported therapeutic foster home, the
ministry instead placed him in a series of staffed residential facilities
that continually failed to address his special needs or his past trauma.
In many instances, it is likely he was re-traumatized by the use of a “safe
room” to manage his behaviour, despite the fact no policy or legislation
exists in B.C. to permit this measure under these circumstances.
“This child has very complex needs as a result of developmental
disabilities, hearing loss, a heart condition and mental health problems.
The Representative acknowledges that finding a suitable, nurturing
residential placement for him is a challenge. But such a challenge is
the core business of the ministry — to protect and nurture B.C.’s most
vulnerable children… not a discretionary service.”
In that case, the representative found that not only were the child’s needs
not being met, but the public was paying for services he never received:
“Group home care for [such] a child … can be very expensive. In his
8
case, the child’s most recent placement cost $400,000 per year. Even
though the child has not been residing in his group home since August
2012, that empty bed continues to be paid for by the ministry.”
More than two decades after Matthew Vaudreuil’s horrific final days, it’s
evident that children continue to suffer and die while in the care of B.C.’s
government ministries.
Coming child and youth watchdog report
follows on years of deaths and injury in care
Today, a child or youth in or recently released from the care of the
Crown in B.C. is likely to die or be “critically injured.”
That’s the unavoidable truth calculated in just over five years of reports
by the province’s Representative for Children and Youth. Over that
period, 504 children and youth died in care, while 1,136 were “critically
injured.”
Some of the deaths are the result of illness — a 2006 report notes
that “about 30 per cent of the in-care deaths were due to congenital
anomalies, nervous system diseases and childhood cancer — conditions
that have not been highly amenable to prevention.” Yet those are a
minority.
Most deaths in care are never investigated. Of the 40 kids and teens who
died in the system in the summer of 2012, for example, 29 cases received
no review. But 11 did. And as the Representative reports, many occurred
while the victims were in the charge of a government department with a
legacy of crucial errors.
This month, B.C.’s current Representative, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond,
will release her latest report — the last before the provincial election. It
will detail the critical injuries and deaths that happened in care in the
fall and winter of 2012. It is expected to report no break in the decadeslong toll of tragedies
First published March 11th, 2013
Inequity in Crown funding for kids on
reserve, human rights tribunal hears
On reserves across Canada, kids are being taken into foster care at a
rate eight times greater than the general population — in part because
aboriginal social agencies are getting short-changed by the Crown,
advocates say.
That’s discrimination and it costs everyone, according to the First
Nations Child and Family Caring Society (FNCFCS) and the Assembly
of First Nations (AFN), who will make their case to the Canadian
Human Rights Tribunal now and through this summer.
If the case results in more dollars going to family services on reserves, it
could significantly reduce the numbers of First Nations children going
into foster care — and landing on urban streets as teens. About 40 per
cent of street-involved in B.C. spent time in foster care, and more than
half are aboriginal.
“Everyone in Canada should be appalled that in this day and age there’s
still that inequity providing service to a child on a reserve,” said Mary
Teegee, the only B.C.-based board member on the FNCFCS. She plans
to speak at the tribunal, in Ottawa, later this summer.
In B.C., child protection and foster care are administered by the
provincial Ministry of Children and Family Development. However, for
148 of B.C.’s 198 bands, those services are funded (at least in part) by the
federal government, and administered by 22 free-standing aboriginal
agencies. On their behalf, the FNCFCS and the AFN have been fighting
to have this case heard for five years. The tribunal started Feb. 28.
Teegee didn’t have numbers that show exactly what the inequity is,
between provincial child protection funding, and what the federal
government supplies on reserves. These will emerge during the tribunal,
she said.
“There’s an absolute cost to society,” Teegee, who is also the program
director at the Prince George-based Carrier Sekani Family Services
agency, said.
“If you look at the reports, they show that a child in care will likely end
up incarcerated, not finishing high school, much more likely to have
HIV and hepatitis. There’s that loss of human potential. I look at some
of our youth, and I think of what they could have been if they’d had the
opportunity to be raised in their home community… When you take
them away from community, that basic human right is taken away from
them.”
The Aboriginal People’s Television Network is streaming the full
hearings. This week, the tribunal is hearing from Jonathan Thompson
(Assembly of First Nations), Derald Dubois (Touchwood Child &
Family Services, Inc., Saskatchewan), and Dr. Nico Trocme (expert
witness and principal investigator of the Canadian Incidence Study on
Reported Child Abuse and Neglect).
Teegee also noted that dollars for family services is not the only inequity
on reserves. Endemic poverty contributes to continuing social problems,
she said.
“We need fundamental policy changes to make sure the child stays with
the family,” Teegee argued.
First published April 5th, 2013
‘Aging Out’: Tough Road for Teens
Too Old to Be ‘In Care’
Some 1,100 former wards of the Crown enter adulthood yearly. What can be done to improve their chances
for success?
If you have been under any of the forms of “care” the province provides
for such kids — in foster care, a group home, or living independently
with some kind of structured financial support — the day you turn 19
you “age out” of eligibility for that care. The government’s responsibility
for you abruptly ends. For nearly nine out of 10 such kids, that means
you’ll be kicked out of your home, or if you’ve been living on your own,
the cheques from the province stop coming.
Johnny, who would rather withhold his last name, discovered what
that feels like a little over two years ago. He turned 19 the week before
Christmas. Now 21, he recalls spending Christmas Eve lying alone on
a mattress surrounded by fighting and drugs at a shelter in downtown
Vancouver.
Every year about 1,100 youth “age out” from care of the Crown on their 19th
birthday. The prospects are poorest for those who are aboriginal or Metis. (Image
from “Lighting up the Darkness,” an illustrated short story about aboriginal youth
in care by Steven Keewatin Sanderson. Courtesy The Healthy Aboriginal Network.)
You’re 19, officially an adult. Happy birthday. Now get out of the house.
As parents, few of us would take such a brutal approach. Yet in our role
as citizens that is exactly the style we adopt toward teenagers “in care”
of the Crown — for whom the government is, institutionally speaking,
their legal “parent.”
It probably wasn’t the lowest point in his young life. Johnny’s childhood
was scarred by rape and beatings. The bruises they left failed to get the
attention of his public school teachers or anyone else in his suburban
community, he recalls. After a stint in a psychiatric facility when he
was 16, the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) —
which administers or contracts out the government’s institutional child
care — provided him with foster families, then group homes, and finally
a support contract that paid his rent and expenses as he finished high
school. Then Johnny turned 19 and was unceremoniously evicted from
his apartment, he said.
Over the next couple of years, Johnny, who is aboriginal but doesn’t have
status, shuttled between shelters. Now, he’s living on a Fraser Valley reserve where
he collects welfare and helps out around the community.
His story is disturbingly familiar to children “parented” by the public through the
intervention of the Crown.
Strikingly, the ministry doesn’t keep track of how many of its graduates end up on
the street. But examining the question from the other end, Vancouver’s McCreary
Centre Society found in 2007 that 40 per cent of “street-involved youth” had spent
at least some time in government care. “[A]lmost one in 10 (nine per cent) were in
foster or a group home at the time of the survey.”
Like Johnny, few such kids meet typical middle-class goals even before their 19th
birthday. Nearly two-thirds fail to complete high school within the standard four
years after starting Grade 8. By the time they reach 19, more than 40 per cent have
been recommended for criminal charges, according to Lauren Freedman, a PhD
student in Criminology at Simon Fraser University who studies foster teens and
the criminal justice system. According to a report in 2012, roughly half of kids in
permanent care of the province were in special education programs at school.
A half billion dollar preparation for the street
Every year, about 1,100 kids in various kinds of government care turn 19. Within
six months, nearly half (49 per cent) apply for income assistance — two-thirds of
those for disability assistance the rest for welfare, according to an email from MCFD
communications. A handful, slightly more than one in 10 (about 12 per cent),
receive continuing support in the form of either a living stipend of up to about
$1,100 per month or annual post-secondary education grants of up to $5,500; to
qualify they must be working full-time, in a formal recovery program from drug or
alcohol abuse, or going to school full time.
12
LIMITED CARE FOR 19 AND AFTER
At any one time, about 5,500 young British
Columbians who were formerly wards of the province
are between the ages of 19 and 24. Some ways the
government continues to support (some of) them:
As of January 2013, 410 of these young adults
(approximately 7.5 per cent of the total) had
independent-living contracts with the Ministry
of Children and Family Development known as
Agreements With Young Adults (AYAs). These pay up
to $1,100 a month in living expenses, in six-months
chunks, while young adults attend rehab, go to school,
or learn life skills. About one-quarter of those who age
out of Crown care receive such support at some point
before turning 24; two per cent get an AYA within one
month of their 19th birthday.
The ministry also provides annual grants of up to
$5,500 for up to four years to former wards who
pursue post-secondary education in the province.
According to a ministry email, 272 such Youth
Education Assistance Fund (YEAF) awards were
made for the 2011-12 fiscal year. So far in 2012-13, the
ministry has provided 241 awards, covering 4.4 per
cent of 19-24 year old former wards.
For whatever reason, the vast majority do not use either program designed to help
them through their young adult years.
About half of the 1,100 youth who graduate from
care each year apply for income assistance within six
months of their 19th birthday: two-thirds for disability
assistance ($906.42 a month for a single person), the
rest for welfare ($610 for an employable single).
Although reliable data are missing, anecdotal information and simple math indicate
that some youth do make the transition from provincial care to employment and
“If they apply for it,” according to an MCFD, “they
receive it.”
independence. Some return to their biological families or continue to
live with their former foster families.
And a network of nonprofit housing and other nongovernmental
services offer continued support for vulnerable youth, including former
kids in care. Funded in part by government, they include Aunt Leah’s
Independent Lifeskills Society, Covenant House Vancouver, and Urban
Native Youth Association (collectively, these three received nearly $5.5
million in public funding in 2012), as well as others.
Still other 19-year-olds who are developmentally disabled become
eligible for support from Community Living B.C.
But like Johnny, many “graduates” from public parenting simply hit the
streets.
This unhappy record has not come cheaply. At 2012 rates, maintaining
one child in foster care and public school from birth to age 19, exclusive
of administration, special education costs, and other expenses, would
cost the taxpayer $280,377 — more than a quarter of a million dollars.
Altogether, B.C. spends nearly $500 million per year on child and teen
care.
Since 2002, according to an email from MCFD communications, the
province has distributed another $8.9 million to about 1,300 young
adults formerly in its care to support their post-secondary education,
an average of $6,846 each. (MCFD doesn’t evaluate whether those kids
graduate from their programs or go on to work in a related field.)
The disappointing result from so much public spending is not news to
the ministry.
The message I heard from deputy minister Stephen Brown in a phone
interview in mid-March was, in effect: we know that many former youth
in care flounder when they turn 19; fixing this is a high priority for us;
watch for changes in the near future.
An in-depth review of provincial residential care tabled in the
13
legislature in June 2012 exposed its particular failure in caring for
aboriginal and Metis youth like Johnny. Many of these kids, the review
admitted, emerge from the Crown’s parenting, “at an increased risk
of homelessness, school incompletion, unemployment, poverty and
dependence on income assistance, and persistent and unresolved
trauma.”
Brown seems determined to do better. Since stepping into his role two
years ago, he has been meeting with former youth in care across the
province. At first, they helped him understand the problems they’d had
with their foster care, independent-living contracts and group homes.
More recently, he’s been listening to them as the ministry prepares to
overhaul its child protection, foster care, and “post-majority services” —
the official term for what the government offers to those who turn 19.
“We’re going to struggle with this until we get it right,” Brown said.
Supporting a longer ‘launch’
“What could the ministry have done better?” Johnny pondered,
repeating my question. “Well, not kicked me out on my 19th birthday.”
The idea that kids of all stripes take longer to make the transition from
adolescence to adulthood in the new century than they may once have
done has gained wide acceptance in recent years.
In 2003, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter drew Americans’ attention
to youth homelessness and foster care in that country, when he wrote
the forward to On Their Own: What Happens to Kids When They Age
Out of the Foster Care System. That report profiled eight teens and
highlighted the strong connection between child protection failures and
youth homelessness. It made no specific recommendations but did point
out that when polled, Americans expressed the view that independence
should come at 23 or 25 — not 18 (the legal age there).
“Few of us push our children out the door when they reach the age of
majority,” the authors concluded. “As citizens of states that assumed
legal custody of these young people until they were 18, we have at least a
moral obligation to help them through their transitions to adulthood.”
Subsequently, one of President George W. Bush’s last acts in office in
2008 was to sign the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing
Adoptions Act. The highly praised legislation gave states access to
federal dollars to extend care to foster kids to age 21 (there are some
conditions, but it allows for continued foster family care).
How much would it cost B.C. to do the same? The province currently
pays foster families $909.95 a month to care for teens. An extra two
years would cost $21,838 per child — roughly $48 million in all for
the 2,200 kids who would turn 19 in that period. Extending the same
support to age 24 would cost taxpayers about $60 million more every
year.
Last year’s residential-care review recommended that young adults be
allowed to receive up to $1,100 a month (the current maximum benefit
under the independent living contracts available to those under 19,
and to eligible “graduates” from care for up to another two years) until
they turn 24. If everyone who “aged out” over the additional five year
eligibility period took advantage of such support, that would add about
$363 million to provincial spending.
The provincial budget tabled in February promised to extend support
to former Crown wards after age 19. “This is a hot issue,” deputy
minister Brown told me. “It’s long overdue. The vast majority of young
people still need that support.” So far, however, these changes have not
materialized in practice.
The Liberal government has taken one important step. On March 14, the
legislature gave B.C.’s child protection watchdog, the Representative for
Children and Youth, the mandate to investigate the province’s treatment
of 19- to 24-year-olds — just as she does now for children and younger
teens.
Money is not enough
14
As important as extending support after 19 may be, one of Vancouver’s
most highly-respected youth outreach workers believes that more
investment alone won’t lead to better outcomes without changing how
services are delivered. It’s a criticism I’ve heard several times.
At just 28, Alejandro Zuluaga is already a veteran front-line worker.
Most evenings he can be found strolling Commercial Drive, a particular
haunt of youth who don’t want to go home. His gift is building genuine
relationships with vulnerable teens. He chats with them constantly. For
some it takes a year before they tell him anything significant. That’s
okay, he told me over eggs and sausage at a coffee shop near his office
at Britannia Community Centre. Given their life circumstances, why
would they want to share with anyone?
Zuluaga would never argue that services shouldn’t be extended to young
adults. Of course they should, he said. But foster kids and vulnerable
teens don’t suddenly become homeless at 19, he argued. They’re set up
for it by a system that fails to connect to those it’s supposed to serve.
“I was at one meeting about a youth who refused to shower,” he said.
“There were 17 professionals in the room, including a doctor, one-toone outreach workers, his foster parent, his social worker, his drug
counsellor. The list goes on.
“Okay. If you haven’t built a relationship with the kid where you can get
him to shower, just adding more services isn’t going to do it.”
Johnny is one of about two dozen youth I’ve spoken with over the last
couple of months, all kids formerly in government care who hit the
streets before or after turning 19. He’s slowly pulling his life together,
but he’s still struggling with things most 21-year-olds take for granted:
a place to call home; a family to feed and protect him; mentors to guide
him.
Whoever wins the coming election and takes over the unfinished
business of reforming the “post-majority” parenting of kids who come
into public care, it’s clear we could be doing better.
Less than half of BC teens in crisis get
needed mental health care: watchdog
Less than half of B.C.’s teens in crisis get the mental health help they
need, according to a new report by B.C.’s Representative for Children
and Youth. Poor political leadership is the root reason, Mary Ellen
Turpel-Lafond argues, in Still Waiting: First Hand Experiences with
Youth Mental Health Services in B.C., released this morning.
As a solution, she recommends that B.C. create a new Minister of State
for Youth Mental Health. The position, if it’s created, will be accountable
for planning and delivering the missing services.
Researchers interviewed 853 youth, parents, caregivers and
professionals, to assess how well the province helps youth, aged 16 to 18,
cope with trauma, depression, anxiety, and other challenges.
The answer: not very well, according to Turpel-Lafond.
“In the process of conducting this review, it has become obvious to
the Representative that the mental health system for children and
youth in B.C. is actually not a system at all, but rather a patchwork
of services that is inconsistent from region to region and community
to community. It is confusing for youth, their families and even the
professionals who serve them and, therefore, actually getting the
required services is often near to impossible.”
This is the third report issued by Turpel-Lafond so far this year
concerning the activities of the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family
Development. Others focused on problems with consistent planning for
youth in care and a detailed account of one teen’s appalling journey
through care, which included being Tasered by police.
She also issued a regular report on critical injuries and deaths in the
child protection system, noting that since 2007, 532 of these children
and youth have died, just over half from natural causes.
Turpel-Lafond also recommended creating an advisory panel of regular
folk involved in the care of children and youth with mental health
challenges.
She noted that she expects to see a detailed operational plan by
September 2013.
*In an emailed statement sent to The Tyee early this afternoon
responding to the report, Health Minister Margaret MacDiarmid refers
to projects that her ministry is already working on to improve mental
health services.
She also pointed out that the Ministry of Children and Family
Development is working on a two-year action plan that will address
issues raised in the report, such as “including improving access to
services and managing waitlists, improving support for families,
improved transition for youth between community and hospital care,
and improving the transition from youth to adult.”
She also notes that the government would consider creating a Minister
of State for Youth Mental Health after the May 14 election.
“Our government appreciates the work of Representative for Children
and Youth in developing a detailed report on child and youth mental
health services,” writes MacDiarmid. “The report highlights challenges
families are facing when navigating the child and youth mental health
system, which government is committed to addressing.”
Foster Kids’ Long Wait for Mental Health Care
BC children in foster care have more barriers to psych assessments than do prisoners.
I first saw “5hadow” (spelled with a 5
instead of an S) from across Granville
Street on a bright day in January. His
long, strong body bopped around and
his unbrushed sandy hair waved, as he
rapped into a microphone connected
to a speaker in a shopping cart.
Is this really the best we can offer him?
Despite a $100 million budget
for mental health, the Ministry of
Children and Families is slow to assess
kids in foster care for post-traumatic
stress, depression or other issues.
Image: Shutterstock.
Standing near a chain pub, with the
air smelling of coffee, he reminds me
of my own teenage years two decades
ago, when street kids owned Granville.
They’re a permanent feature, it seems, despite city’s the $21 million
“revitalization” of the street, completed in 2010.
I took him for sushi. Over California rolls, he told me about growing up
on the Gulf islands. He explained that the prescriptions he took at home
to manage his bipolar disorder made him fat and depressed (which is
why he doesn’t take them anymore). He told stories about his group
homes, his foster sisters, and leaving the system at 19. Since then, he’s
been couch-surfing, sleeping rough outdoors or in shelters and low-rent
hotels. He proudly says he’s written a novel. He confesses he would like
to study literature and psychology at university.
If I were his mom, or sister, that’s what I’d hope for him — not begging
for quarters beside a pizzeria. Heck, as a citizen, this is not a particularly
proud moment for me. He’s disabled by his wayward brain chemistry.
His unmedicated self made him a crummy group home roomie and
impossible employee, he acknowledges.
5hadow isn’t the first street kid I’ve met, formerly in the care of the
province, who’s been diagnosed with a mental illness. In fact, as I’ve
walked Davie, Granville, Hastings and Commercial Dr. over the
past two months, the number of homeless youth I’ve spoken with
who haven’t confided a “label” –bipolar, like 5hadow; anxiety disorder;
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); depression; or the
common prenatal brain injury of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
(FASD) — amounts to just a handful.
My walkabouts have revealed the same reality as several recent more
formal reports. When the McCreary Centre Society interviewed 762
street youth across B.C. in 2006, more than half reported having
received a psychiatric diagnosis or another mental health problem.
Another study the following year found a similar story in our capital
city: nearly half the street youth interviewed for the University of
Victoria’s 2006 ground-breaking “When Youth Age Out of Care: Where
to From There?” reported that they had been diagnosed with depression
— apart from other health problems.
Is “street kid” just code for “a kid with a mental illness?” I went looking
for someone who could help me figure out what’s going on.
‘I swear to God it’s every kid’
Heather Bayes sees trauma, depression, FASD, and other disorders daily
at home. She’s the president of the B.C. Foster Parents Association but considers
herself in the “minor leagues” among foster parents: she’s taken in just 25 kids,
mostly teen boys, over 14 years — compared to others who have parented in some
cases more than 100 over decades.
Every foster parent, she told me, struggles to get their kids assessed for mental
illness.
“I swear to god, it’s with every kid I’ve ever had,” said Bayes. “It’s a huge issue.”
Here’s what happens, she said. The teen comes into your home — likely after
years suffering abuse, being moved between relatives, and developing attachment
disorders. They’re further traumatized by being apprehended and taken away from
their family. Then they come into your home. Soon, you notice an issue. You tell the
social worker assigned to the kid that an assessment would be helpful. She calls back
to say the kid is on the list.
Then you wait. Two weeks. Eight weeks. Maybe over a year. Just for an assessment.
“It would be lovely if every child was assessed when they come in to the system,”
Bayes said. “But it’s not a reality, and it’s not going to happen no matter who is in
government. It’s just too costly.
“I don’t want to sound defeatist. I know we can do better. The question is how.”
Jails and prisons do more
The province does a better job of screening those who have been convicted of a
crime, either federally or provincially, for mental health problems. In B.C., everyone
entering a correctional centre has received a mental-health review since the year
2000 — about 17,000 new inmates annually, compared to about 10,000 children and
youth who are in foster care at any one time.
An emailed statement from BC Corrections spokesperson Marnie Mayhew
describes a coordinated mental health service that would be the envy of Heather
Bayes.
“B.C.,” her emails claimed, “is the only province in Canada that has a dedicated
17
RCY REPORTS ON TEEN MENTAL
HEALTH
It’s not just foster kids. Less than half of B.C.’s teens in
crisis get the mental health help they need, according
to a new report by B.C.’s Representative for Children
and Youth. Poor political leadership is the root reason,
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond argues, in Still Waiting:
First Hand Experiences with Youth Mental Health
Services in B.C., released this morning.
As a solution, she recommends that B.C. create
a new Minister of State for Youth Mental Health.
The position, if it’s created, will be accountable for
planning and delivering the missing services.
Researchers interviewed 853 youth, parents, caregivers
and professionals, to assess how well the province
helps youth, aged 16 to 18, cope with trauma,
depression, anxiety, and other challenges.
The answer: not very well, according to TurpelLafond.
“In the process of conducting this review, it has
become obvious to the Representative that the mental
health system for children and youth in B.C. is
actually not a system at all, but rather a patchwork of
services that is inconsistent from region to region and
community to community. It is confusing for youth,
their families and even the professionals who serve
them and, therefore, actually getting the required
services is often near to impossible.”
Turpel-Lafond also recommended creating an
advisory panel of regular folk involved in the care of
director of mental health services as part of its correctional system. In addition,
each centre has a dedicated mental health professional who is responsible for
coordinating the services offered to inmates with mental health needs. And, each
centre has one or more mental health liaison officers, who are correctional officers
with specialized training in mental health issues. B.C. has established a collaborative
relationship with the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital to minimize wait times for
inmates with acute psychiatric needs.
“In addition, senior BC Corrections staff led the development of a federal,
provincial and territorial Mental Health Strategy for Corrections in Canada. The
strategy, the first of its kind in Canada, seeks to ensure that offenders with mental
health needs are provided an enhanced continuum of care and services in a
progressive and consistent way — while in custody and after release.”
BC Corrections spends $18 million annually on the physical and mental health,
dental, psychiatric and psychological care, and addiction treatment of inmates —
the service doesn’t break out the cost of screening alone. The Ministry of Children
and Family Development, in contrast, spends over $100 million a year on mental
health services for minors — both in care, and in the general population.
Improvements are in the pipeline
Like other services for kids in care, the situation of youth with mental illness is
starting to get more attention — though as of now, most changes are still in the
“planning” stage.
Indeed, many of the high-profile cases of foster care gone wrong reported by B.C’s
Representative for Children and Youth involve kids with profound mental health
challenges. Just two months ago, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond issued “Who Protected
Him? How B.C.’s Child Welfare System Failed One of Its Most Vulnerable Children.”
The report described an un-named boy whose “complex special needs” resulted in
his being restrained, isolated, and eventually tasered by police. He remains in care.
Turpel-Lafond recommended four new strategies to the Ministry of Children and
Families (MCFD) responsible for the well being of children and youth in care of the
Crown. One would create new specialty homes for children and youth with such
18
children and youth with mental health challenges.
She noted that she expects to see a detailed operational
plan by September 2013.
In an emailed statement sent to The Tyee early this
afternoon responding to the report, Health Minister
Margaret MacDiarmid refers to projects that her
ministry is already working on to improve mental
health services.
She also pointed out that the Ministry of Children and
Family Development is working on a two-year action
plan that will address issues raised in the report,
such as “including improving access to services and
managing waitlists, improving support for families,
improved transition for youth between community
and hospital care, and improving the transition from
youth to adult.”
She also notes that the government would consider
creating a Minister of State for Youth Mental Health
after the May 14 election.
“Our government appreciates the work of
Representative for Children and Youth in developing
a detailed report on child and youth mental health
services,” writes MacDiarmid. “The report highlights
challenges families are facing when navigating
the child and youth mental health system, which
government is committed to addressing.”
– PW
“complex needs;” another would give social workers additional training.
She urged MCFD to implement the changes by the end of 2014.
MCFD deputy minister Stephen Brown has a PhD in clinical
psychology. It was his first job and remains his passion. He couldn’t
agree more that new supports are needed for teens in the system with
bipolar disorder and other challenges.
He promised several changes within the next year. For one, ministry
staff will be trained to recognize trauma. In addition, children and youth
will no longer need a referral to an outside pediatrician or a psychologist
to address depression, anxiety, or trauma; instead, the ministry plans to
“embed” such practitioners in care teams alongside social workers.
But he also conceded that even these services won’t be likely to
transform young adults such as 5hadow into clean-cut Rachel Berrys or
Finn Hudsons. If a youth has debilitating, post-traumatic stress disorder,
or anxiety, Brown said, a “good” outcome is that they won’t be expected
to start living independently instantly at 19; rather, that government will
support their transition to adulthood as fully as it does for those with
developmental disabilities.
Of course, as 5hadow’s story illustrates, simply being assessed for mental
or emotional difficulties isn’t enough. He was diagnosed with bipolar
disorder well before he left care at 19, even medicated for it. But as
he aged, follow-up was scarce. So now he stands on Granville Street,
rapping about good and evil, and writing stories about beautiful people
who get lost.
Perhaps he’d have been better off had he gone to prison.
19
Leaders silent on BC’s foster care mess
During last night’s debate, no party leader made a peep about fixing
foster care or child protection in B.C. But they did awkwardly talk
around it.
Here’s the context: This province is home to nearly 10,000 youth, aged
16 to 24, who are either finishing or have recently finished their time in
the care of the province. We are their collective parents, and whoever
becomes premier is elected Mom or Dad.
Since 2007, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth has been
pumping out reports, slamming the province for failing to protect kids,
failing administratively, failing to effectively intervene in domestic
violence, and failing to fix other problems.
The result is, more than half of kids in care will arrive at 19 without a
high school diploma, nearly half will have been caught for a crime, and
half will go on income assistance within a few months of their birthday.
(In the U.S., just three per cent of former foster kids earn a postsecondary diploma; B.C. doesn’t keep records.)
In addition, many have brain injuries such as fetal alcohol syndrome,
and mental illnesses such as depression, and many live with trauma,
which reduces their brain function.
In other words, this is a group that’s been set up to fail in the so-called
“knowledge economy.”
Here’s what leaders did talk about during the debate: jobs and training,
and child poverty.
Adrian Dix accused Clark of cutting skills training, and creating a jobs
plan that has resulted in 34,800 fewer private sector jobs.
Clark volleyed back that the Liberals are investing in jobs training, that
the province has gained 33,000 jobs, and that the NDP will invest in
training but the jobs will leave for Alberta.
Dix noted that young people need jobs training “for the jobs of the
future.” He promised the NDP will increase apprenticeship completion
rates.
Clark said there’s 100,000 jobs associated with liquefied natural gas
(LNG), and that kids need the training to be ready for those jobs.
Dix brought up B.C.’s continuing record as the top province in Canada
for child poverty.
Clark answered that child poverty is at its lowest level in decades,
though more work needs to be done. And developing industry will
reduce “parent poverty,” which is the root of child poverty.
The good news: political leadership can fix it, says a guy who should
know.
A few hours before the debate, I interviewed former premier Michael
Harcourt. Back when he was a young adult, in the 1960s, he said, wellpaying jobs were plenty for those without post-secondary, or even high
school.
Now, though, new technology — even in the resources sector — means
vulnerable youth who are not prepared for post-secondary are “sunk,”
he said.
“It’s bad news for kids with learning disabilities or those who have
traditionally not done well: immigrants who are struggling with
language, aboriginal kids, young people with disabilities. This economy
can be harsh for certain parts of the community.”
Whichever party forms the next government, Harcourt noted that
political leadership is sorely needed.
“We have these real challenges: foster care, the prison and mental health
institutions and services for vulnerable women with kids. These systems
are broken and need fixing. Kids on the street, we know they’re dealing
with mental illness, abuse, drugs, and also bipolar disorder, depression,
and brain damage. . . we have a human tragedy.
“Foster kids we’re not serving well, yet. I think we can. The wheels are
starting to grind slowly.”
On jobs, he said:
“We need to make this the number one issue in B.C. — matching kids in
BC to the jobs that are going to be unfilled. There’s tremendous potential
there. Government, business, education, families, foster care and other
institutions — we need to up our game, everyone, that we can satisfy
this challenge.
“All these B.C. kids that are wandering and directionless — that’s the
biggest issue of today.
“We need to focus on it with the same intensity as in 1990s when
we ended the war in the woods. We threw the whole weight of the
provincial government into fixing it. There were huge initiatives, a new
forest practices code, we changed the approach with First Nations, we
spent $2 billion on forest renewal, and we put a lot of energy. When was
the last time you heard of a dispute in the forests? We were able to fix
that, and we can fix this.
“The reality is, we need them [all youth] and they need us.”
21
Lessons for BC in Florida’s foster care vote?
On May 1, the beginning of the U.S.’s National Foster Care Month, the
House of Representatives in Florida extended care to its most vulnerable
young adults.
a year in public services like policing, health care, emergency services
and jails (or nearly $8 million if he or she stays homeless from age 19 to
80), that up-front investment in a kid is a bargain.
Reps voted 119-1 to extend Florida’s foster care from age 18 to age 21.
In B.C., foster teens lose their housing and funding at 19.
After the vote, Rep. Nancy Detert, the Florida politician who pushed for
this change for a decade, told the Miami Herald, “On your 18th birthday
you will have a safety net. You can choose to say ‘I don’t feel comfortable
being put out of the street. I would prefer to stay in foster care.’”
Florida isn’t alone. Washington, New York, Nebraska, and last month
Hawaii all voted to extend foster care to 21. The reason is most
American foster teens get kicked out of the system at 18 years old.
Many are left without the skills to survive as adults, so often they hit the
streets, go to prison, and apply for welfare.
The movement was started by the Fostering Connections to Success and
Increasing Adoptions Act, one of the last pieces of legislation signed by
George W. Bush in 2008. It recognized that most kids are not ready to
support themselves at 18.
The solution seems common sense, though its impact on education and
homelessness has yet to be measured. Nearly half of all young adults live
with their parents for at least part of their 20s. As some advocates say, 25
is the new 19.
If B.C. were to institute the same solution, it wouldn’t be cheap. Paying
for a teen to stay at home for that extra two years — from 19 to 21 —
would cost $21,838 in direct payments to foster families alone, at 2013
rates.
But given that one homeless person costs taxpayers as much as $135,000
First published May 2nd, 2013
The Foster Care Discussion BC Politicians Ignore
It's far from a central talking point this election, say three insiders who offer their views.
So far in this election campaign,
politicians from across the spectrum
have failed to make foster care and child
protection — two major government
services — a central talking point. Many
of the up to 100,000 British Columbians
involved in the system have not made
the same mistake. See this report on
what’s at stake.
frontline worker here, and a street outreach worker in Winnipeg.
What do you see on Vancouver’s streets that reveals the state of the
system we have?
What can B.C.’s next leaders do
to help our most vulnerable?
The Tyee Solutions Society contacted
three insiders to chew over what those who want to run the province
and the $270-million child protection system should be talking about.
They are: Nova Kaine, a young mom who has insider knowledge of
the foster care system; Kate Hodgson, the executive director of the
Downtown Eastside’s Network of Inner City Support Services; and Scott
Clark, former president of the United Native Nations B.C.
Tyee: Nova Kaine, as a young mom, and as a former foster kid, you
have a front-seat view of the system. How helpful has the system been
to your own parenting?
Nova Kaine: I have found [social workers] to be helpful and unhelpful.
They were extremely helpful, though slightly intrusive at first, but also
taught me and helped me get a solid support network for my family. I
have heard of much worse. . . horror stories. When the ministry comes
in there’s no option there, whether you need help or not. If you reach
out for help with no open or previous file, you are screwed.
Tyee: Kate Hodgson, before you were the executive director of
Vancouver’s Network of Inner City Support Services, you were a
Kate Hodgson: I see a lot of children and youth that are not included
in their communities, especially in Vancouver’s inner city where
poverty and race collide to create a climate where young people and
their families are not included in “civic life”— our community centres,
schools and other institutions. These are the youth that are on the street,
are seen as “problems,” are attending school seldom or not at all, and
are victims of violence and exploitation. I also see second and third
generations of children in the care system, which speaks to the fact that
we are not intervening at the root and addressing issues in a way that
can make a real difference — in ways that support children and youth
in the context of their families, their communities and with a view to
healthy transitions to young adulthood.
Tyee: Scott Clark, since leaving your post as president of B.C.’s United
Native Nations Society (which represents off-reserve aboriginal
people), you’ve become a critic of handing aboriginal agencies
power over child protection. This is widely considered to be a Liberal
success story; the numbers of aboriginal kids cared for by aboriginal
agencies has tripled over their watch. What’s the problem?
Scott Clark: We supported transferring services to off-reserve Aboriginal
agencies throughout B.C. and negotiated an agreement. Since then we
have seen limited success. Some have argued issues have gotten worse.
Since there is no strategy in place, many agencies treat our citizens as
deficit clients and continue to work in silos and segregation. We seek
First published May 9th, 2013
a strategy of empowerment and peer support in the design, delivery,
evaluation and modification of a strategy. Making issues more difficult
is the lack of cooperation within aboriginal agencies and between nonaboriginal and aboriginal community representatives.
Tyee: The B.C. Liberal government made some pretty significant
changes to the foster care system since taking office in 2001. Yet child
protection hasn’t been a talking point so far in this election. Why do
you think that is?
Nova Kaine: I think it’s because they either don’t know how bad it is, or
they don’t know how to fix it — or care to.
Kate Hodgson: I think child protection has not been addressed in
this election because of how completely broken this system really is.
The state has been a parent that has been particularly neglectful of
the children in its care — the type of parent that they would remove
children from. The child protection piece is part of a larger, complex
issue where there are no easy wins and no silver bullets — not easily
digestible in a soundbite or in “program” funding announcement. The
government that we have after May 14 will have to address not only the
complete failure of the existing system, as shown in report after report
by the Representative for Children and Youth, it will have to protect
vulnerable children by implementing changes across many ministries
and systems, with support of communities and residents. This will take
a shift in thinking and some serious changes to our existing funding
streams.
24
Kate Hodgson: While there are larger forces at play — economically,
primarily — things have not always been this way. We have created
systems that are not accountable to communities or to young people.
The systems are not focused on creating healthy, engaged youth who
will as adults will be leaders and role models. The system is in “reactive”
mode, and that is something that can be changed. However, the current
system is focused on “silos” and does not see how not investing in a
plan that really works with a child to ensure they have supports to
finish school and access to proper health services now means that we
will be paying much more down the line in our jails, mental system
and emergency room costs. Complex problems require comprehensive
solutions, but these are well within our grasp and have other living
examples from other places to prove this. We need champions to take
this on!
Scott Clark: The ongoing violence to our youth in the inner city is
but a prime example of how MCFD [the Ministry of Children and
Family Development] and its client agencies are continuing to fail our
vulnerable children and families. I note the Sept. 21, 2012 suicide pact
involving 30 children, all aboriginal and mostly between the ages of
12 to 15. Since this suicide pact was stopped, we have seen and heard
of many other incidents in the area of the ongoing violence, be it older
men preying on these kids, gangs in the area, police attacks and so forth.
Over 80 First Nations bands refuse to support the existing relationship
of MCFD and are seeking alternate ways to work with their children and
families.
Tyee: How much faith do you have that any government can repair
the challenges underlying foster care? In other words, are the system’s
poor outcomes the fault of the system or something else?
Tyee: If you were going to propose one single, simple solution to
breaking the link between foster care and youth homelessness that is
achievable by the provincial government, what would it be?
Nova Kaine: I strongly believe that the system’s poor outcomes are
the fault of the system’s poor strategies. There’s so much that has been
messed up, for decades. . . half a century. I believe they should be
trying to educate and help the families instead of the “take the kids, ask
questions later” method. It’s disgusting how many families I’ve seen torn
apart over easily solvable problems, yet other kids are being looked over.
Nova Kaine: Listen to the kids! There is a huge issue about foster families
versus families fostering their own relatives. The foster families get
more than a family fostering a family member. I find that slightly off.
Shouldn’t it be the same, being that both styles of home placement is
taking care of the same youth? Keep the families the priority! Also I
believe that training and education are essential for staying off the street.
Life skills, work skills, trade and employment, and most of all people
skills. I would like to see more funding to get families working together,
and also more in-depth parenting classes for first-timer parents and
those that just need the help.
Kate Hodgson: Change the current funding models that only tackle
symptoms and move to a “place-based” model that has taken root in
Australia, in Harlem and other jurisdictions. The place-based model
involves communities in creating solutions and recognizes that one
size does not fit all — that what will ensure children are supported and
successful in a northern, rural community will be different in a large
urban centre. It can tackle issues of poverty that really underlie our
failures for children and youth in care. It can focus on prevention —
early childhood education, early assessments of special needs, support
for young parents — and in bringing together multiple systems like
health, education, housing and foster care systems in each place can
have some effective and cost efficient solutions that do not ignore the
environment children are growing up in and how complex the issues
they face are.
Scott Clark: [Along with supporting the place-based model], it would be
great to see the provincial and federal governments enhance revenuesharing with cities so they can use the resources to leverage others
to fund a strategy, as opposed to funding programs and projects in
isolation of a comprehensive strategy. The system’s poor record is a
direct result of the ongoing dysfunctional, segregated, competitive
model. Resources need to target the families — not build a parallel
[aboriginal] system in the city. Each agency must develop an urban
aboriginal strategy within the agency.
25
Foster Care System Touches One
in 20 British Columbians
All of the four major parties’ election platforms are missing a clear
strategy to improve B.C.’s foster care system.
Could the reason for the missing outlines be the misunderstanding that
the system reaches such a small number of people?
According to this reporter’s research, the system directly affects nearly
200,000 British Columbians per year — or about one in 20 of us.
Probably many, many more.
Currently, there are just 8,960 children in the care of the province,
“the lowest level in more than a decade,” according to B.C. Liberal
Party materials. It represents fewer than one per cent of the province’s
kids.
But don’t let that frequently-used number fool you.
Across the province, about one in 30 kids (or 31,753 of 962,259 B.C.
children and youth) has an open file with the child protection system.
This does not count the impressive number of social workers, advocates,
nonprofit administrators, front-lines workers, teachers, housing
providers, therapists, doctors, addictions specialists, lobby groups, and
others involved with the system. Nor does it count the roughly 5,500
young adults between 19 and 24, who are recent graduates of the care
system, many of whom are struggling.
This is a big file. Delivering these services is a significant part of what
the new government will do. You’d think there would be more chatter.
From the infamous deaths of Sherry Charlie and the Schoenborn
children, to the momentous Hughes review, the hand-over of resources
to the aboriginal care agencies, the hiring of the activist-watchdog, B.C’s
Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, her
many damning reports not to mention the other 500 plus children and
youth who have died while receiving services of the ministry (half not
from natural causes), this file asks, “How does B.C. care for its absolutely
most vulnerable citizens?”
The ministry receives another 30,000 protection reports — that is,
requests by teachers, neighbours, or family — for investigations each
year. That represents another one in 30 kids (there is some overlap).
That’s about 61,753 kids. Of the children with open files, there are 34,117
parents recorded by the ministry. For the 30,000 investigation reports,
there are two parents per child (at least, at one time), for another 60,000
parents. In addition, there are 3,235 contracts with foster parents —
plus an unknown number of spouses, foster siblings, extended family,
etcetera. Plus, an unknown number of kinship caregivers.
So a conservative number of people directly affected by the foster care
system is 189,105.
First published May 13th, 2013
Gutsy MLAs Requires to Fix ‘Crazy’
Foster Care System, Says Prof
Will B.C.’s Child and Youth in Care Week, which ends Saturday, June 8,
raise enough awareness to break the connection between foster care and
youth homelessness?
Three steps to preventing foster care-related youth homelessness, he
suggests, are:
Stephen Gaetz hopes so — but only if politicians get on board.
Government is responsible for much of this mess, he said.
• Keep kids in the system until they’re really adults, perhaps to
age 25, as Ontario’s Child and Youth Advocate recommended in
January 2013 and in other communications, since at least 2010
Over the past decade, the York University education professor has
interviewed hundreds of homeless youth and young adults. What could
possibly lead these teens to the street, he asked, given the hunger, sexual
exploitation, the depression and violence associated with living rough?
• Track outcomes from foster care much better — for example,
follow youth for five years after they leave the system –- so we
know exactly how we’re doing as guardians.
The answer: foster care. In every study, he said, just over 40 per cent
of homeless youth report spending some time in foster care — a
provincially run system that cares for kids who can’t live with their
families. Many more, he estimates, were affected by the child protection
system.
“It’s crazy,” Gaetz said in a phone interview, “just totally crazy what we
do. [Foster care is] just totally different from how we treat mainstream
young people.”
Part of the reason for the connection between foster care and
homelessness, he noted, is that the system ditches most youth at 18 or
19. He’d never expect his own kids, who are university-aged, to make
it on their own. Why does Ontario — other jurisdictions in Canada
including B.C. — condemn so many vulnerable teens to homelessness?
In his new free ebook, Youth Homeless in Canada: Implications for Policy
and Practice, Gaetz has collected 26 solutions-oriented articles which
together, outline a serious plan for ending youth homelessness, and
breaking the connection between foster care and the street.
• Galvanize political leadership to create a real plan aimed at ending
youth homelessness.
All of these are achievable by one group only, he said: government.
Gaetz is appalled that after so much research, over so many years, there’s
so little measurable change in outcomes.
“When as a politician there’s no gain and it’s not a vote-getting thing, it’s
hard to make it someone’s priority,” Gaetz said. “But that’s what’s gotta
happen. Just one province, ending youth homelessness. Then the rest
would follow.”
This was B.C.’s third annual Child and Youth in Care Week. It’s a
partnership of the Ministry of Children and Family Development,
the Federation of BC Youth in Care Networks, Adoptive Families
Association, Federation of Aboriginal Foster Parents, the BC Federation
of Foster Parents Associations and the Public Guardian and Trustee.
First published June 7th, 2013
This May 14, Ontario celebrated its first Child and Youth in Care Day,
though it has yet to be officially proclaimed by the legislative assembly.
In the U.S., May has been National Foster Care Month since 1988, when
it was proclaimed by then-president Ronald Reagan.
“I really believe in champions,” Gaetz said, noting the importance
of events such as Child and Youth in Care Week. “I don’t think
homelessness gets taken up enough. In federal elections it never gets
discussed. It’s never a debate issue. Maybe people’s attitudes about kids
in care, and negative attitudes about teens, mean they don’t care that
much.”
28
BC lags behind US, UK on extended foster care
One British lobby group is schooling the rest of the world on how to
make change, in a hurry.
The Don’t Move Me campaign, organized by The Fostering Network,
makes the case that ending care at 16 or 18 (depending on the local
council) hurts vulnerable youth. The campaign aims to allow all youth
to stay in their foster care placements, without being moved, until
they’re 21 — if they choose to.
The campaign includes about two dozen on-camera interviews with
MPs, plus youth and foster parents, each one speaking about their own
transition away from home, or their kids’.
MP Goggins was a natural fit for the bill; as a former social worker, he
understands first-hand the relationship between an abrupt end to foster
care, poverty and homelessness.
In an email interview, Goggins said lobbyists should use others’ voices
to make the issue heard: “It is important that foster carers — and
where possible the young people themselves — contact their elected
representatives and explain their experience.”
Later this year, the House of Lords will hear the amendment.
Nearly all of them declare that support is needed far beyond a 16th
birthday.
MP Paul Goggins, who brought the amendment to the Children and
Families Bill to the House of Commons in June, even said his 28-yearold child is still at home. He noted that ages 16 to 18 are very vulnerable
years for all youth. Dumping them out of care in the midst of finishing
high school and hopefully starting post-secondary makes little sense, he
says.
In B.C., youth “age out” on their 19th birthday. Many lose their homes
then. Even before, at age 16 or younger, many youth are put on an
independent living contract instead of into family care. The Youth
Agreements are worth about $1,100 a month, and outcomes can be
rough; just one third of youth who are on a YA graduate from high
school by their 19th birthday.
Some support is available after 19, but most young adults don’t receive it
consistently. In the US, several states have extended foster care to age 21
this year. They include Hawai’i, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Washington,
New York and Nebraska.
First published July 2nd, 2013
When Foster Care Hurts
Can US-style litigation help fix Canadian child protection services?
“Children are entitled to be protected
from abuse, neglect and harm or threat
of harm.”
That’s the first ‘guiding principle’ of the
B.C. Child, Family and Community
Service Act — the legislation that
mandates the foster care and child
protection systems operated by the
provincial Ministry of Child and
Family Development.
ministry takes any allegation of abuse very seriously. I can assure you
the ministry would investigate any time we’re made aware of such
concerns and would take whatever actions are appropriate.” At the time,
of course, Fabian says she didn’t report the alleged abuse.
The ministry has also increased criminal records check requirements for
foster parents, according to the spokesperson.
Foster kids face higher risk of
addiction, homelessness.
But what if, instead of providing the promised protection, this wellintentioned government agency’s contractors beat you as a child?
Serena Fabian (not her real name) says that’s exactly her situation.
Social workers apprehended her as a young child from her mother, she
recounted. But instead of protecting her, she says, the Ministry in fact
exposed her to much more “abuse, neglect and harm” than she believes
she ever would have suffered at home.
Now 32, Fabian says she lives with memories of countless sexual assaults
— starting when she was seven years old — inflicted by the teenaged
son of her foster mother, as well as beatings, screaming tirades and
neglect from those who were paid to care for her.
The trauma, she believes, set her up for a decade of alcoholism, drug
addiction and violence starting in her mid-teens. She ran away from her
foster family and became homeless.
In an emailed response, a government spokesperson noted that “The
Fabian had her own first daughter at 18. Ever since, she says, social
workers have buzzed around her, judging her parenting and threatening
to remove her children. Sometimes they have done so: removing her
kids only to return them later.
“They [social workers] didn’t help me with counseling, or trauma
counseling, to help me grieve my childhood,” she said in an interview in
a nonprofit office near Commercial Drive. That, she believes, set her up
to fail. “No matter what I achieve today — college, sobriety — my past
still hovers there. Sometimes when I look at myself, all I see is my inner
scars. It’s like I’m inside out.”
Now clean and sober but living on disability assistance with five
children, she wants justice. Not just for herself: her oldest daughter is 14
and starting to drink and use drugs. Given what happened to her in her
own teenage years, Fabian is terrified that her children will relive her
foster care horrors, and the cycle will go on.
So she called a lawyer.
Fabian is thinking about suing the Ministry of Children and Family
Development for its treatment of her in foster care. Will it fix the past?
First published July 5th, 2013
No. But, her reasoning is, it might just increase pressure on the government to
make sure child ‘protection’ systems really do protect other kids — and not just
compound their damage.
Justice, and some good
Fabian’s claim is for personal injury. So far, she hasn’t heard back from her law firm
about whether her case has merit. But, she’s far from alone in using a lawsuit as a
means to fix the system — and get a little justice in the meantime.
And there’s a deeper question at stake: When government departments don’t meet
their own standards and commitments can Canadians count on our courts to hold
those agencies accountable and effect change?
It’s an approach an increasing number of otherwise marginalized Canadians are
using.
In 2005, 79,000 residential school survivors sued the federal government in
Canada’s largest-ever class action lawsuit. They won a $5 billion settlement and what
felt — at least to some — like the beginnings of justice.
This summer, the First Nations Children and Family Caring Society (FNCFCS)
is before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, seeking justice for families living
on reserves. The FNCFCS alleges that child protection, education and other
reserve services are underfunded by at least 22 per cent compared to off-reserve
services. That’s resulting in far too many aboriginal kids being placed in foster care,
according to witnesses.
In Ontario, five young women are suing the Prince Edward County Children’s Aid
Society (CAS) and their former foster parents, alleging sexual abuse while in care.
Their case was filed in April.
In B.C., Gloria Mae Biron’s book-length memoir of abuse in foster care, Breach of
Trust, ends with her attempted lawsuit against the Ministry in the late 1990s. (She
couldn’t be reached for comment for this article.)
31
A HIDDEN HORROR
Canadians would be “horrified” if they knew what happens
to former foster kids, says Stephen Gaetz, a York University
education professor who has spent the past two decades
researching youth homelessness.
The problem is, we don’t know.
No Canadian jurisdiction systematically tracks young
people, he reports, after they leave foster care.
“I’d love to know, over five years [between age 19 and 24],
what happens to them,” says Gaetz. “What per cent are
going to school, what’s going on? How are their transitions
being managed?”
However, a Ministry spokesperson did explain that data
on high school completion and income assistance rates for
19-year-olds is available, and there’s plans to increase data
collection.
In fact, the province already does something like that, just
not for the most vulnerable among us.
Researchers for the BC Student Outcomes Surveys annually
phone and survey 30,000 graduates two years after they
receive their post-secondary degree or diploma, looking for
information about how well their education prepared them
for work; how much they’re earning; and whether they’d
make the same decision again.
That information allows policy-makers to evaluate the
effectiveness of the $5.2 billion the public spends on the
post-secondary system in B.C.
Nothing even remotely similar exists for “graduates” of
the $500 million child protection system which each year
touches the lives of about one in 20 B.C. kids and teens.
Lawyer are winning battles
These are isolated cases, but in the U.S., lawyers are winning battles that
lobbyists have lost for better treatment and better outcomes for kid in
foster care. Could the same happen here?
Miriam Ingber, 34, is a Canadian-raised senior litigator with Children’s
Rights, a highly-effective New York-based national nonprofit that sues
state governments to improve child protection and foster care. Canada
she said, has nothing quite like it to effectively demand change.
Growing up in Toronto, Ingber said, she was influenced by the record
of big American civil rights lawsuits brought “in the glory days of the
1960s” to improve the lives of average people: Brown vs. the Board of
Education, for example.*
“Why litigate?” Ingber asked, on the phone from New York. In a word:
results.
Children’s Rights isn’t interested in more government reports and plans,
Ingber said. Lawyers are only interested in effects: children and youth
experiencing safer care, more humane
care, better education outcomes, and
less criminality among those in care.
“We go to court to establish the
rights of children to be protected
from maltreatment and raised in
safe, healthy, permanent homes,” the
organization’s Web site declares. “Our
legal campaigns force open the doors
of systems that lack the transparency
and accountability necessary to
identify and fix problems that often
have plagued them for years.”
“For foster children,” Ingber explained
Litigator on behalf of foster
kids, Ingber: “We go to court to
establish the rights of children.”
(Photo: Children’s Rights.)
32
“there’s not a clear constituency of people who are advocating for them.
There are always [paid] advocates, but there’s never enough money,
they’re always getting the short end of the stick, they’re the first ones to
lose funding. Often, they don’t get the attention of politicians.
“There comes a point, at least in the U.S., when the political system has
failed. There’s not the money or the will power to make the changes
that are needed. So you have a system that has not been performing.
That’s when an organization like ours steps in. When teens are agingout without any sort of transitions, and there’s all sorts of very poor
outcomes — it hurts not just children, but society.”
Court monitored improvement
In Michigan, by contrast, the courts took just two years to get Children’s
Rights a settlement agreement that set up a court-monitored strategy
for improving care. Within a single year, the state had returned more
than a quarter of backlogged kids to their homes; reorganized care
into a central authority; reduced social workers’ case loads by half; and
implemented other reforms.
Indeed, B.C. is rich in reports — but poor in outcomes data (see
sidebar). Starting in the mid-1990s, there’s been the Gove Report,
the Hughes Review, the B.C. Representative for Children and Youth’s
many damning reports, the Residential Review Project, the Ministry of
Children and Family Development’s current overhaul, the delegation
of much of child protection to stand-alone Aboriginal agencies, other
government-initiated projects, plus a filing-cabinet-full of nonprofit and
academic reports.
Yet, according to limited academic and government research here,
spending time in the foster care system is still associated with low
graduation rates, increased criminal activity and youth homelessness.
In fact, even litigation-averse Cindy Blackstock, the Gitxsan executive
director of the First Nations Family and Children Caring Society, says
courts are sometimes a necessary spur to urge lethargic governments
forward. She’s a former social worker on the Squamish reserve in North
Vancouver and the Downtown East Side. In both places, she said, she
witnessed what chronic underfunding and lack of political attention can
do to a population.
“I’m not one of those who rushes to the courts right away,” said
Blackstock, in a phone interview from Ottawa, where the Canadian
Human Rights Tribunal is underway. “First, you need to present an
evidence based solution to your problem. And if they still don’t do it,
then yes, go to court.”
Fabian, of course, isn’t sitting around waiting for the ministry to fix itself
— or her. In her mid-20s, she tackled high school, taking three underfives on the bus each morning to daycare near her classes. She finally
graduated — with honours. Soon, she’ll graduate again, this time with a
certificate in early childhood education, an opportunity to heal herself
by caring, with gentleness, for another generation of young kids.
“After you go through so much childhood trauma, I didn’t ever really
think I’d recover from that,” she said. “The pain was so great, I still think
the worst of any situation. ‘Uh oh. My daughter or my son slipped up.
They’re going to take away my kids.’”
If her kids are apprehended, she said, she wants guarantees the ministry
will never put them in danger. But if the government didn’t listen to her
as a child or a parent, she reasons, maybe it will when she sues.
33
Vancouver Island University waives tuition
fees for former government wards
Vancouver Island University is in the media spotlight after the
administration announced a tuition waiver for a small per centage of
kids in the province’s child protection system.
Spokesperson Janina Stajic said the program will allow former wards
of the government to have their tuition paid for, and that they may still
apply for other assistance grants to cover living expenses. The university
has not budgeted for a certain number of students applying for the
waiver, Stajic said, but is “waiting to see what the response is going to
be.”
To qualify, the student must have been a permanent ward of the
province. In B.C., there are 4,298 kids and teens under a “continuing
care order” from birth to 18 years old. Wards represent about half of
kids in the foster care system at any one time, and are a small minority
of kids involved in the entire system — there are about 30,000 open files
with B.C.’s Child Protection Services.
In B.C., the province offers wards a post-secondary grant called YEAF,
the Youth Education Assistance Fund. It offers up to $5,500 a year for
up to four years, an amount that doesn’t cover the total costs of going to
school.
About 300 former wards per year get a YEAF grant, and the Ministry
of Children and Family Development does not keep data on how many
of these youth graduate from their post-secondary programs. The 300
grants represent about five per cent of the 5,500 former kids in care and
on youth agreements who are between the ages of 19 and 24.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth
and the most prominent advocate for youth in care, challenged B.C.’s
post-secondary institutions to offer tuition waivers earlier this year. She
has been an enthusiastic supporter of VIU’s initiative.
In other words, one in 12 kids in the system may qualify for the waiver.
Of kids who are permanent wards of the province, less than half
graduate from high school.
The university’s effort follows in the footsteps of the University of
Winnipeg, which announced a similar program in March 2012. At press
time, U of W had not confirmed whether any students have claimed
the offer so far. In June, Ontario expanded its free tuition program to
all public universities and several community colleges. In Arizona this
June, representatives extended free tuition for foster kids at the three
state universities. Utah, Texas, Florida, and Oregon all offer former
wards at least some free tuition.
First published August 15th, 2013
Can Public Service Kickstart
Canada’s Young and Jobless?
This is her moment. She’s crossed the divide.
“We don’t really expect her to be that different,” her mom, Mayra Funes,
says the next day. “I hope she’ll start keeping her room cleaner!”
The form remains, but in 21st century Canada the function of such
traditional rites of passage into adulthood, marking that moment when
kid and community agree that it’s time to step up — ‘Today, you are
a man. Today, you are a woman’ — in many cultures has largely been
lost. Instead, like a Mortal Combat player reclining on a basement sofa,
adolescence stretches out ad infinitum.
Nearly half of young adults 20 to 29 live at home.
Young demonstrators participate in Occupy Toronto protests, Oct. 15, 2011. In
recent years, accumulating debt, delayed careers, lagging incomes and zero savings
have crushed the 18 to 24-year-old set. Photo: arindambanerjee / Shutterstock.com.
Wearing a sparkling blue satin dress that could have been made for Teen
Dream Barbie, Santana Huetzelmann, 15, lifts her arms like Evita Perón.
It’s her quinceañera — a traditional Latina 15th birthday celebration.
Her brother and three male friends, all lean legs and arms, boost her
in the air and slowly rotate her around so the guests can applaud her
transformation. Goodbye childhood: her mom gives her a last doll, in
a replica dress. Hello, womanhood: she dances with her step-dad, and
then boys — ostensibly, for the first time.
In Greater Vancouver, the average young adult age 20 to 24 earns just
$983 per month — not even close to the cost of living, let alone tuition.
Even slightly older young adults 25 to 34 earn on average just $2,775 per
month here, a number driven up by this age group’s minority of young
professionals.
Why? At 19, one in five B.C. kids hasn’t finished high school. By 25,
nearly half of Canadians have failed to earn a post-secondary credential
— the basic foundation of adult earning in the knowledge economy.
The trend is well documented in pop culture, from Generation X (1991),
to Reality Bites (1994) to Bridesmaids (2011), and the current film
festival darling, Mistaken for Strangers (2013). Magazine articles bemoan
the plight of the jobless university grad. Underlying the pop-cult meme
is a strong backbone of statistical analysis exposing the systemic roots of
the phenomenon.
First published September 9th, 2013
This is nothing new. Fictional failures to grow up go at least as far back as J.M.
Barrie’s 1904 Peter Pan. Even modern-day extended adolescence was pioneered by
Gen Xers back in the 20th century, and perfected by Gen Y. But after 20 years of
increasingly serious debt, delayed careers, lagging incomes and zero savings, it’s no
longer just quirky film fodder. It’s a genuine social issue.
The question is, who’s responsible for helping these stalled lives launch?
Some say government. South of the border, a powerful group of intellectuals is
promoting an old-school solution: a new, national, youth service organization
designed to transform befuddled adolescents into genuine citizens in just one year.
It’s an ambitious but refreshing call for a national-scale solution to a society-wide
problem. Other thinkers until now have been better at identifying scapegoats —
including parents, schools and the economy — than answers.
In her book Slouching Towards Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty
Nest (2012 Penguin), former McCall’s magazine editor Sally Koslow admits her
frustration with her live-at-home “adultescent” kids, and those of her peers.
“Adultescents have taken egoism and not infrequent narcissism to the next level, a
broad savannah of entitlement…” she writes. “Our young adult children now exist
in a perfect storm of overconfidence, a sense of never-ending time, and a grim
reaper of a job market.”
While Koslow spends much of her book documenting the lingering recession that
crushes even privileged American youth, at the end of the day she lets the economic
system off the hook. Instead, she pushes parents towards a more foster care-like
approach to parenting young adults with a dose of tough love: “We’ve raised you.
Now get out.”
Another author, Christian Smith, suggests that today’s young adults flounder
because they live in a moral vacuum. His book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of
Emerging Adulthood, sees high rates of alcohol and drug use, promiscuity, debt and
personal drift as symptoms of a generation that has not asked itself a basic question:
what is the good life?
Unsurprisingly, Smith is the director of Notre Dame University’s Centre for the
36
‘WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY’
From universal, mandatory military conscription to
environmental stewardship work, many countries invest
in some kind of transition program for youth. Some
examples:
United States: AmeriCorps
With 80,000 participants a year, this 19-year-old program
offers a modest stipend for domestic volunteer service.
Much like the famed Peace Corps, formed in 1961, but
local.
Mexico: Military service
Mandatory year of service for all males at 18; optional
for females. Also, in return for heavily subsidized
tuitions, Servicio Social requires all university students to
complete 480 hours of voluntary service.
Austria and Switzerland: ‘Zivildienst’
A nine-month alternative to the six-month required
military service; can be served in hospitals,
environmental projects, etc.
Singapore: National Service
All men required to serve in the police or the military for
up to two years. Objectors face three years imprisonment.
Gambia: National Youth Service Scheme
A skills-building program for youth up to age 30 who
have dropped out of school and are underemployed.
Study of Religion and Society. Based on interviews with 230 youth aged
18 to 23, he concludes not that most youth make bad moral decisions,
but that they make no moral decisions at all.
Most, he found, simply had no internal compass for negotiating the
complex, all-you-can-eat buffet of sex, narcotics, financial credit,
technology, and consumer goods available to them — unravelling their
capacity for personal discipline just when they should be stepping up.
He doesn’t blame young adults for their moral morass. Instead, he
blames America’s parents for failing to pass on a moral framework.
The answer he suggests is for his countrymen, especially its transitioning
youth, to do some “cultural soul searching” about central questions like:
“What really is a good life? What does it consist of? What more than
anything else makes life worth living? What has real value? Why do we
feel so compelled… to consume and dispose of so much stuff?”
Yet for all their diagnostic precision, Koslow and Smith are rather light
on how to redirect today’s spoiled, amoral 20-somethings. Smith does
advance one idea though: that voluntary organizations recruit young
adults into public service.
It’s an idea that’s beginning to resonate.
A needed ‘national rite-of-passage’
Colorado’s Aspen Institute, in fact, is taking the notion of organized
youth service to a much larger scale.
In June, the Institute hosted a gathering of 100 U.S. politicians,
academics, editors and business leaders to promote the idea of a new
national service organization for American youth. Called the Franklin
Project, the initiative is chaired by General Stanley McChrystal, former
U.S. commander in Afghanistan and currently a senior fellow at Yale
University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
“To help stem the high-school dropout crisis, to conserve rivers and
37
parks, to prepare for and respond to disasters, to fight poverty and
perhaps most important, to instill in all Americans a sense of civic duty,
the nation needs all its young people to serve,” he argued recently in the
Wall Street Journal.
In many countries compulsory national service — especially military
service — is the defining moment between childhood and adulthood.
Mexico, Iran, Israel and Russia all require a year or more, as do
Brazil, Singapore, Turkey and more (some require just men to serve;
others, both men and women). In the U.S., the Peace Corps, Civilian
Conservation Corps, and more recently the AmeriCorps, are all national
voluntary service organizations with the underlying aim of motivating
and leading youth into adult, citizen-like behaviour.
In Canada though, the country’s
premier national youth service
organization is on the rocks.
Katimavik was never the coercive,
immersive experience that mandatory
military service is, but it did offer
a basic introduction to adulthood.
Katimavik offered a nine-month
program to about 6,000 17 to 21-yearolds per year, living with a small
group of diverse youth in three parts
Russia is one of many countries
where mandatory military service
of Canada, volunteering on local
is a right of passage into adulthood.
service projects and learning selfPhoto by Sergey Guneev/RIA
care: cooking, cleaning, and conflictNovosti.
resolution. With a sexy ambassador
for a time in Justin Trudeau, and
a popular memoir by humour writer Will Ferguson, I Was a Teenage
Katima-Victim: A Canadian Odyssey, the program even had some
swagger.
Some participants needed to learn such basic living skills as doing their
own laundry. Others “discovered themselves” once away from their
families. Several found career inspiration. All of them, Katimavik’s
interim CEO Diane Trahan asserts, became more motivated,
community-oriented and independent — psychological antidotes to the
apathy so characteristic of failure-to-launch syndrome.
“One of the founders of Katimavik thought it should be mandatory,”
Trahan says. “That all young people need to discover their country, to
discover other Canadians.” But far from expanding the Trudeau-era
program — let alone making it a national right-of-passage — the federal
government’s 2012 budget eliminated Katimavik’s $14-million annual
funding.
Trahan is lobbying to have her program refunded, gleaning
support from more than 700 alumni.
Meanwhile, she has refocused its remaining bare-bones program on
former foster kids. Last year, Katimavik ran a pilot program for six
foster kids in B.C., and Trahan hopes to launch a targeted program for
former foster kids in Peterborough, Ontario, in partnership with Trent
University. It would adopt some of Katimavik’s signature components
— like collective living and public service — with additional
encouragement to audit classes at the small, progressive liberal arts
school, and perhaps later to enroll.
The goal remains the same as in Katimavik classic: a short program
aimed at transforming feckless youth into competent adults with a sense
of direction and responsibility. In that, the refocused Katimavik joins
dozens of charity-model agencies helping vulnerable teens and young
adults find stability, school and employment. In B.C. they include Aunt
Leah’s Place, Urban Native Youth Association, Directions Youth Services
Centre, Covenant House, SOS Children’s Village and many others.
Not baby boomer redux
But while former foster kids may need extra help transitioning to
adulthood, they’re hardly alone. With fully half of Canadians in their
38
20s living at home, this is a broadly based problem. Should it have a
broadly based national solution?
At the SOS Children’s Village in Surrey, executive director Douglas
Dunn knows that kids trying to master adulthood after a childhood
spent in public care aren’t the only ones struggling. Sixteen vulnerable
youth live in his facility’s family-like environment; some are from the
foster-care system, but many aren’t.
“They’re coming from ‘the home next door,’” Dunn says. “There’s split
parents, step-parents. There’s been school cut backs in counseling and
support. And these youth seem to have no outlet other than peers with
bad information. They try to take things into their own hands, and
they’re left adrift.”
Still, after 30 years in non-profit administration with Big Brothers and
Big Sisters of the Fraser Valley and the BC Council for Families, Dunn’s
not among those pressing for national service. Not only would that leave
fewer government dollars for specialized services such as his, he argues,
but Dunn doubts whether the youth he knows would respond
“I feel for those who see a large, World War Two-style AmeriCorps work
program, with massive mobilization of labour, as the [solution],” Dunn
says. But “look at the kids themselves,” he cautions. “You can’t even get
three of them to agree on what to call themselves — hipsters, or bikers,
or whatever. They have cell phones that can instantaneously call Cairo
and ask a guy what’s happening on the streets there. You cannot class
these individuals as a massive group, put them in uniforms and expect
to churn out an army of new baby boomers.”
Recent UBC graduate Irina Sedunova, 30, has witnessed the dark side of
both a laissez-faire attitude to youth “launch,” and its polar alternative of
national military service.
As a graduate student in journalism, she produced a report on a
young woman named Violet-Rose Pharoah. Pharoah had a relatively
good experience in Ontario’s foster care system, but “graduated” at
21 with little, only to land on Vancouver’s streets, addicted to heroin
and eventually, selling her body for crystal methamphetamine. She’s
witnessed what a lack of government attention to transition looks like.
Child-care workers in Ontario removed Violet-Rose Pharoah from her
home at age eight. She transitioned out of foster care between 18 and 21,
then wound up on Vancouver’s streets.
But as a teenager herself in her native Russia, aspiring journalist
Sedunova also saw male friends forced into military service. “It was a
terrible experience,” she says. “Twelve months of crying and wanting to
go home.”
Making her video report, she says, “made me appreciate the experience
I had” — some family and state support, but no mandatory national
service.
A moment, not a decade, in between
At her quinceañera, Santana Huetzelmann glowed. She’d chosen the
music for her important first dance carefully. It would be Britney Spears’
“I’m not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”
I’m not a girl
(I’m not a girl don’t tell me what to believe).
Not yet a woman
(I’m just trying to find the woman in me, yeah).
All I need is time (All I need),
A moment that is mine (That is mine),
While I’m in between.
The tabloid queen of adolescent behaviour stretching into her
mothering years was a curious, perhaps revealing choice for a moment
that symbolized blossoming womanhood.
For Huetzelmann’s mom, as long as that “moment in between” is a
moment and not a decade, the quinceañera, will have done its work.
39
Lost: Low-skill, Decent-pay, ‘Entry’ Jobs
Seven sectors that once put youth to work have withered, making it tough for today's cohort to lift-off.
rush. Boats crewed by folks with little formal education could net a
$1-million catch in a week, according to B.C. Seafood Alliance executive
director, Christina Burridge. Japan’s economy was booming, and Japan
had an appetite for herring. Safety standards were low. Catch limits were
high. And 15,000 people made their living from the coastal fishery.
“So foster kids are flunking out of
school. I guess the world always needs
plumbers, eh?”
The person who said this to a reporter
heads a national youth organization.
Her offhand comment shows how
thoroughly the mythology of wellpaying, easy-entry jobs persists.
Once, a generous handful of sectors
offered employment and familysupporting incomes to the least skilled
and those who ditched school early.
These days, that’s one in five B.C. teens
and most of those who graduate from
the provincial foster care system.
Nearly all of that has changed. Salmon stocks plummeted. New training
standards introduced in 2010 shut those without high literacy out of
the industry. Safety standards rose, requiring investments that kept
many boats off the water. Efforts to rebuild fish populations have limited
fishermen to taking 30 per cent of returning fish instead of 80; this year
may see a complete ban on fishing in the Fraser River. Even Japan’s
taste for imported herring ebbed. Margins for B.C.’s 5,700 remaining
fishermen are low.
Commercial fishing is one of the
sectors where good paying jobs
for the young-but-untrained
have all but disappeared. All
images courtesy of City of
Vancouver Archives.
But times have changed. Over the past
30 years, a perfect storm of social forces,
from environmental collapse to labourreplacing technology, health and safety standards, the decline of unions,
and global and local competition, has washed away those old standbys.
Wonder why it’s so hard for one-fifth of today’s young people to find
work that supports them? A large part of the answer can be read in the
combination of dwindling jobs in, and rising barriers, to these seven
industries:
Commercial fishing
Back in the 1980s, British Columbia’s fishing industry was like a gold
“Probably the biggest reason for failure [in the fisheries today] is
business skills,” said Burridge. “Anyone who lacks the education to run a
business is going to find it much harder.”
Forestry
Jonathan Lok is a relatively young guy, just 38 years old. But in a 20-year
career in forestry, he’s witnessed big changes. As a teenager without an
education, he recalls, he logged in the summers and earned enough
to pay his post-secondary tuition. Now the jobs are fewer, and few
companies hire young, unproven keeners.
“The margins are so thin,” he said. “You can’t hire five guys and hope one
works out anymore.”
Twenty years ago, he said, B.C. forests were abundant in money, people
and high-value, old-growth trees. Now, the owner-CEO of Strategic
Forest Management says, his employees mainly harvest second-growth
timber. It’s more equipment-dependent, higher-skill work. Fewer people
are needed.
While a few employers are still willing
to take a risk, the conditions aren’t
likely to attract most of today’s selfabsorbed, self-indulgent “adulescents,”
as one author calls them. The work
is in camp, with no wireless, early
mornings, and often, long, cold, hard,
wet work.
41
The military
Until the 1980s, you only needed to have completed Grade 8 to enlist
in the Canadian Armed Forces. While the official requirement is
still only Grade 10, Major Richard Langlois, spokesperson for the
Canadian Forces Recruiting Group, noted that the forces receive 40,000
applications per year for just 4,500 positions. As a practical matter, most
who are accepted have earned at least their high school diploma.
But Langlois stresses that the military isn’t eager to be regarded as
the country’s employer of last resort. “The CAF remain interested in
potential candidates who truly seek to pursue a career in the CAF,”
he told The Tyee Solutions Society, “rather than potential candidates
uncertain of their future and seeking short-term employment.”
Manufacturing
Mining
B.C.’s manufacturing industry
complains that its employers can’t
find enough people to hire, even at
Image courtesy of City of
above-average wages. But they’re not
Vancouver Archives.
looking for Lavernes and Shirleys to sit
by a conveyor belt, and put the tops on
bottles between wisecracks. That popular sitcom was broadcast three
decades ago and portrayed an era already past. Today’s manufacturers
are looking for people with technical skills learned at post-secondary
school.
City slickers might not realize that B.C. is home to nine metal mines,
10 coal mines, 35 industrial mineral mines, many smaller mines, plus
nearly two dozen operations either in construction or in the permitting
process. B.C. companies predict they’ll need up to 20,000 new miners
over the next decade. And as of last year, according to the BC Mining
Association, miners earned an average of $98,200 a year.
But it’s up against stiff competition to hire the qualified. “That big
sucking sound is Fort MacMurray,” said Peter Jeffrey, the vice president
of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association for B.C.
“But then we have this mobility of labour problem. For the [very few]
unskilled jobs that do exist, people in Vancouver don’t seem to want to
move to Prince George or Prince Rupert.”
The bad news for the unskilled: nearly all those jobs require postsecondary school.
The in-demand jobs include heavy equipment operators, mechanics,
supervisors, mining and quarrying geologists, geochemists and
geophysicists, drafting technologists and geological engineers.
For someone without an education the outlook is much bleaker. A
few hundred mine jobs for unskilled labourers are scattered across the
province. Average income for a full year of full-time work as a labourer
can still reach $52,230. But in reality, that describes only one-quarter of
such jobs.
42
Retail
Union wages once made retail sales work a viable full-time occupation
for many. MP Pat Bell put himself through university working at the
Woodward’s camera counter for $12 an hour in the early 1970s. That’s
more than many department store workers earn today. Superstore was
paying $23 an hour for cashiers back in the 1990s.
But those wage levels have been whittled back by years of de-unionizing.
Safeway and Save on Foods, both of which offered livable starting wages
in the past, negotiated different (tiered) wages for new workers starting
in 1997. The last unionized Starbucks bit the dust in B.C. in 2007. Zellars
employees, formerly represented by United Food and Commercial
Workers 1518, lost their contract in a B.C. Labour Relations Board
hearing in 2012, when Target took over the lease. Ikea Richmond is
working hard to tier its contract with its workers, offering some less
than others.
The retail sector still represents the largest occupational group in B.C.,
but average pay for full-time, full-year work — something only one in
three clerks can hope for — is only $35,468.
Most clerks, working part-time, earn even less. A job at Sears
Personalised Gifts (Things Engraved) advertised on the WorkBC
website, for example, offers minimum wage — $10.25 an hour — and
part-time hours. High school graduation is required, eliminating many
of the most vulnerable young job candidates.
Agriculture
Just a couple of generations ago, farming is what Canadians did if they
weren’t doing something else. Most people who wanted a career in
farming simply started as teenagers, either on their parents’ farm or
a close relative’s, according to Reg Ens, executive director of the B.C.
Agriculture Council. They learned on the job, putting in sweat to earn
enough money eventually to buy their own parcel of land.
Image courtesy of City of Vancouver archives.
In 1931, one in three Canadians lived on a farm. Today, that number
is one in 46, meaning that most young Canadians have little contact
with farming, let alone a pathway to working in agriculture. Even for
those with a family history in farming, the soaring cost of farmland and
equipment has become a prohibitive barrier to entry for many.
Sure, agriculture offers entry-level jobs that require no post-secondary
schooling in agriculture: fruit-picking or plant thinning for example.
But they won’t support a family, according to Reg Ens, executive director
of the B.C. Agriculture Council. They’re seasonal, and part-time.
To qualify for a career in agriculture, Ens said, some post-secondary
school is usually necessary. Even a teenage, part-time assistant
herdsmen who wants to keep his hand in dairy will usually need to take
a certificate in nutrition and herd management, he noted.
In the past, most people who wanted a career in farming simply started
farming as teenagers, either on their parents’ farm or a close relative’s.
They learned on the job, putting in sweat to earn enough money
eventually to buy their own parcel of land.
“It used to be enough that if I were a good production person, I could
be a farmer,” said Ens. “Now, you need to be a good businessperson.
‘What crops do I produce? Where do I sell? Do I invest in food safety
technology? How much debt do I take on? How do I negotiate my
contracts?’”
As with most businesses, Ens said, many fail. No longer can farm labour
be considered Canada’s national fall-back career.
43
When Family Fails, Schools Can
Do More to Care for Youth
Four ways to help at-risk students thrive in the classroom.
Dropping out is widespread. One in five
B.C. teens won’t graduate high school by
the time they reach 19.
Still more disturbing, that ratio is
upended among teens in B.C.’s foster
care system: less than half of kids who
are wards of B.C. graduate by 19.
Eric Jensen is a neuroscientist and former middle-school teacher whose
“brain-based learning” empire includes workshops, DVDs, and 26 book
titles, including Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to
Kids’ Brains and What Schools Can Do about It.
Some experts think that new
approaches to the classroom
could mean fewer teens
and young adults on the
streets. Student photo via
Shutterstock.
Educators don’t need The Fraser
Institute to tell them poverty is a top
indicator of which students flounder and
fail. Though controversial, the rightleaning think-tank’s annual school rankings highlight the divide very
clearly.
Vancouver offers 18 public secondary schools. Nine are on the east side,
and nine are on the west side. In 2012, among schools in the lowerincome east side, six reported more than one-quarter of their senior
students were flunking. On the higher-income west side, that level of
failure was recorded at only two schools.
Rather than wait for yet-to-be-invented new social programs to
eradicate family dysfunction and poverty, four leading educators argue
that schools could be doing much more on their own to improve the
outlook for their most vulnerable students.
Big idea: Train teachers to understand and neutralize
the effects of poverty.
He grew up middle class. Later, as a teacher, he was mystified by
the classroom behaviours he observed in some of his students. He
discovered that poverty was a common contributor to their chronic
lateness, absenteeism, acting-out, impatience, rudeness, inappropriate
emotional reactions and general lack of empathy. Poverty’s
consequences, in other words, included an undermined ability to get
much out of the classroom.
As he studied neuroscience and started to apply brain research to
teaching, he focused on how the stress of poverty actually changes
the brain. He discovered that it impacts memory, impulse regulation,
language and cognitive skills, as well as emotional development.
“What I’m interested in is what allows kids from poverty to make it,” he
said.
Poverty, he acknowledges, is something teachers have no control over.
But with one in five American students growing up in very challenged
homes, he believes that learning to teach despite its effects is an essential
skill.
The secret isn’t in bearing down on academics, he insists, but on
relationships. Children and youth become open to learning, he argues,
when they have strong, reliable relationships with their teachers,
friendships with other students, and good social status. Growing up in
poverty, however, many kids will be missing such learned emotional
tools as patience, forgiveness, gratitude and humility. Without first
better socializing students who live with poverty, Jensen argues,
anything academic will fail.
He suggests teachers do that by role-modelling respect constantly —
even when students are acting out.
Acknowledge students no matter what time they arrive, and teach them
the basic social skills like making eye contact, smiling, shaking hands,
and saying please and thank you. Those will lay the foundation for more
complex social skills such as problem-solving, cooperation and group
work, which do not come naturally to kids living with poverty. Teachers
should also thank students, Jensen suggests, and be ready to celebrate
effort — not just achievement.
Big idea: Switch to semesters; let counsellors counsel.
For some bright students who are crashing in mainstream schools, one
model classroom boasts a tremendous success rate. But it’s exclusive;
potential students need their social worker or probation officer to refer
them there.
The Vancouver School Board’s Pinnacle Program is an alternative school
offering Grades 11 and 12 in a learn-at-your-own-pace format. It meets
on the third floor of an aging social services building near the city’s
Downtown Eastside Victory Square.
The school’s 20 students take a course or two at a time, and set their own
hours. Lunch and fresh fruit are always available. Most students who
attend not only graduate, but go on to post-secondary school. Grads in
the class of 2013 went on to study criminology, hair styling, trades and
other courses.
45
While Pinnacle is one successful model for offering intense support to
vulnerable kids — especially kids who are in the foster care system —
youth and family worker at the school Kim Brand believes small changes
in mainstream public schools could offer many more struggling teens a
greater chance of success, too.*
Currently, she points out, most high-school age students in B.C. take
eight courses that last all the school year.
“This schedule puts vulnerable teens right behind the eight ball,” Brand
explains. Miss a few days or weeks due to family problems or illness, and
you’re hooped.
Switch to a semester system, she argues, with only four courses at a time,
and instability becomes a lot more manageable. Catching up in four
courses, she notes, is much more achievable than scrambling after eight.
Half of what Pinnacle does differently, Brand says, has nothing to do
with academics. Instead, it’s helping kids with the practical aspects of
making the transition to independent young adulthood. Teachers help
the teens find and apply for post-secondary school. They walk them
through applying for grants and bursaries. They also stay in touch with
the teens for months or years afterwards.
That kind of intense support may be impractical in large public high
schools, Brand acknowledges. But school counsellors — experts in
helping students negotiate their transition out of school — are too-often
bogged down in creating and changing student course schedules. Brand
suggests that school counsellors should be freed from that duty to do
more actual counselling work, “with kids who really need that nurturing
and support, to get kids through school and keep them from dropping
out.”
Indeed, Brand believes that some support should continue even after
course-work is completed. “It’s not good enough to just graduate them
and send them out the door,” she insists. “At 19, they still need contact,
46
so we continue to feed them and hold their hand. We do whatever we
can to keep them holding on.”
and connecting them with support services when needed, Brokenleg
explained.
Big idea: Admit that schools are already socialservice hubs, and support them in that.
The model ensures that kids are noticed — feeling invisible at school is
one of the complaints most heard, particularly from former foster kids
— and takes some pressure off classroom teachers who can then focus
more attention on academics.
Many educators resist the idea that schools should take on additional
social services. And certainly, Martin Brokenleg says, they’re not
currently funded to play that role. But in reality, he asserts, parents often
trust their local school in a way they don’t trust other public agencies or
churches.
Brokenleg is a Victoria-based psychologist and vice president
of Reclaiming Youth International, an aboriginal agency that trains
educators and other adults to work with vulnerable youth. He’s also a
member of the American plains Lakota Indian Nation, a theologian and
co-author of Reclaiming Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future.
For many B.C. students, family challenges bleed into the classroom.
One-third of kids showing up for kindergarten in Vancouver aren’t
ready to learn, according to the Human Early Learning Partnership,
a UBC research network that studies the impact of young children’s
experiences. Social, language or other challenges impair the start of their
school career. Family and neighbourhood dysfunction is at the root of
the problem, Brokenleg acknowledges, but schools can offer an antidote.
“Here, social isolation is endemic in nuclear families, with no
extended family support,” Brokenleg noted. “A kid growing up in that
environment won’t have the social experiences of a kid growing up in a
coastal village, where they have that interaction across generations.”
Some schools in Europe facing concentrations of high-needs families
have instituted a so-called “educator model” — separating classroom
teaching from student tracking and mentoring duties. “Educateurs“, each
serving no more than two classrooms, take responsibility for observing
kids’ academic and social behaviour, keeping in touch with parents,
Big idea: Give promising foster kids a taste of
university-level learning.
In the U.S., just three in 100 former foster kids ever graduate from a
post-secondary school. In turn, educational failure is a major reason
why so many former foster kids find themselves homeless, Kathleen
Reardon argues.
Reardon is a business management professor at the University of
Southern California Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles, and
author of Childhood Denied: Ending the Nightmare of Child Abuse and
Neglect. In 2007, as she sat writing a book charting dysfunction in the
U.S. foster care system, an idea sparked.
Universities, she recalls realizing about the setting where she’s spent
most of her life, are really very good at helping lonely teenagers become
functional adults. They’re staffed by professors with every conceivable
health and social expertise, and attended by thousands of students who
actively seek out pre-professional volunteer experiences to fill out their
resumes.
Why not harness those skills to help foster kids?
Reardon contacted First Star, a Washington D.C.-based American
lobby group that advocates for better treatment for foster children and
youth. The agency picked up the idea and with Reardon’s involvement
began the “Academies program.” Each summer, groups of 30 promising
14-year-olds are invited to live away from their foster and group homes
on a university campus.
Although the success of the program has yet to be tested, the concept is
simple. Students stay for a month each summer, bond with each other
and a team of university-based mentors, and get an intense introduction
to the importance of education, through speakers, workshops, and
simple lessons, such as hands-on healthy cooking.
Later, when the students return home, volunteers from the university
will visit each child monthly throughout the following school year. The
hope is, they’ll pursue degrees, and thus inoculate themselves against
cycles of poverty and homelessness.
The approach isn’t cheap. Each group costs about $250,000 a year to
support. But it’s an amount Reardon says she has no trouble raising. So
far, First Star has partnered with four universities to start “academies” at
the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Rhode Island,
Washington D.C.’s George Washington University and the University of
Connecticut. In Illinois, Northwestern University has just announced
that it, too, wants to host foster kids.
Within the next couple of years, Reardon plans to open the first “365
Academy,” where teens will live year-round on campus — essentially
being fostered by the university community, and living together. A big
group home for intellectuals.
The program’s first cohort of students will graduate high school next
year, giving Reardon a chance to gauge its success by the number of
university acceptance letters its graduates receive.
47
Why Efforts to ‘Fix’ Floundering Youth Fail
Assumptions about unemployment and street involvement can undermine our attempts to help.
jobs designed to help them. Clients were blowing off the money and
paid skills-building for… what?
Many of the youth were graduates of Ontario’s foster care system; others
ran from abusive families to the streets; still others came from seemingly
nice homes, but were struggling to get lift-off into adulthood. All of
them were on income assistance. Jobs they could do were there to be
had. So what was the problem?
Ottawa’s conundrum is relevant to B.C., where 49 per cent of former
foster kids apply for welfare or disability assistance within six months of
aging out of the system on their 19th birthday, and many other young
high school grads or drop-outs struggle to find their economic footing.
Karen Foster: A close-up study of a failing effort in Ottawa to place struggling youth
in jobs, led to insights. Photo courtesy St. Mary’s University.
Similar to other job-finding agencies, Ottawa Youth Employment’s task
seemed simple. Get street-involved youth off welfare and working. The
strategy, which involved sending youth to government-sponsored work
projects, seemed promising. OYE offered a street-level office, built-in
employers, and a plentiful supply of youth who clearly needed some
direction.
But for reasons no one understood, the idea was flopping. Apart
from a couple of superstar examples, staff at the OYE couldn’t get the
vulnerable youth they were supposed to be serving to show up for the
Seeking answers, OYE’s director asked workplace sociologists Karen
Foster and Dale Spencer to investigate. Foster has a PhD in sociology,
and she’s the Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow in the management
department at the Sobey School of Business at St. Mary’s University,
Halifax. Spencer is an assistant professor of sociology at the University
of Manitoba. Their research eventually became a book, Reimagining
Intervention in Young Lives: Work, Social Assistance and Marginalization.
The duo interviewed 45 of OYE’s clients. Each recounted how they came
to be on welfare, and shared their ideas about work, money and school.
In doing so, their answers highlighted for Foster how middle-class
assumptions about unemployment and street involvement undermine
efforts to help.
Foster and Spencer’s conclusion: government intervention in the lives of
young people fails because it doesn’t understand the young people being
49
served. Offer floundering youth real support to stabilize their lives —
housing they can afford, childcare if they need it, and income assistance
— they argue, and they’ll sort it out themselves, in time. Try to “fix”
them by shoving jobs and education at them, and they’ll disappear.
“That’s a tough question. It’s like asking how we can know
who really needs disability payments and who’s faking; who really needs
to collect [employment insurance] and who’s abusing it. Our perspective
in the book was that the only way [for experts] to [help young adults]
sort out the effects of childhood trauma is to get really close and
supportive.
I contacted Foster by phone from her Halifax office to learn more:
Tyee Solutions Society: What’s the biggest misconception you
encounter when telling your business school peers about your
research?
“The first one would be that all these kids have to do is just get a
job. That’s a classic thing that people say to homeless people. The
misconception is that their lives are pretty simple.
“When you talk to [street-involved young] people and get a sense of
what they’ve been through, it’s pretty horrendous. Just year after year of
people shitting on them. It just shows that a lot of this stuff is beyond
their control.”
Where do these attitudes come from?
“I think there’s a dominant discourse that’s not limited to political
persuasion — that people are largely in control of their situations, and
they should just pull themselves up from their bootstraps. And that
people who are poor or homeless are just lacking the motivation they
need.
“It’s a really powerful discourse. It makes people who are doing well feel
good, and allows people to abdicate responsibility for people who are
not doing well.”
You say in your book that it’s reasonable for teens who come from
very traumatic backgrounds to take some time off from work or
school in their late teens and early 20s to recover. That is what many
graduates of B.C.’s foster care system seem to be doing. From a public
policy perspective, how do you know which kids are doing the work
of recovery, and which are simply putting in time?
“When you do that, you start to see that what might look like
malingering is usually more complicated. Extended dependence on
social assistance isn’t usually a decision that people make willingly when
they have other options. There is so much shame and stigma associated
with dependence on social assistance; the kids we talked to didn’t want
to be on it, nor did they want to be unemployed.
“Our general finding was that when interviewees were psychologically
and physically able to work, they found work. It was usually only terrible
working conditions (abusive employers, exploitation, ridiculously long
commutes on public transit or dangerous night shifts) that made them
leave, or ‘choose’ income assistance over employment income.”
How long is it reasonable to let kids linger on welfare, even if they’re
recovering from trauma?
“The question of how long we should collectively support poor people,
regardless of work ethic, is a moral one. It stems from a political /
ideological shift away from seeing poverty as a social problem to be
solved through wealth redistribution toward seeing poverty as an
individual pathology that is only exacerbated through welfare.
“This shift wasn’t based on any empirical evidence of welfare being a
‘perverse incentive’ for people to shrug off paid work. It was entirely
an ideological argument tied to some pretty terrible ideas about social
Darwinism — that is, starve the poor so they don’t reproduce and voila!
Poverty eliminated.
“We have evidence that paid work is important to people, and they’ll
choose work over social assistance whenever and wherever possible.”
Give us some sense of why these teens can’t just get it together.
“The context. The devaluing of jobs you can do without a post-secondary degree.
There are still tons of jobs you can do right after high school, but they suck in terms
of pay, benefits, prestige and control.
“There was a time, and it was brief, but you could get a job in retail or in a factory,
and these were permanent full-time jobs. Now, you need a certificate or a degree for
an entry-level job. The demand for credentials has gone up.
“Really, that golden age of really good jobs was only really working for westerners,
and mostly men. It was not necessarily sustainable. But it provides a model for
something we could do that would improve working conditions for all people.”
What did you find when you looked under the rug at OYE?
“The real problem is the climate they were trying to operate in: the structure of
income assistance provides a real disincentive for people to work. The types of jobs
that this employment program offered were mostly manual, with no chance to move
up in any way, and realistically, completely disconnected to a career trajectory.
“OYE did well keeping some people off the streets and out of trouble for a while. But
overall, the program had just one or two really big success stories.”
Everyone knows that good jobs require post-secondary. That’s been true for
20 years. Yet most of the 45 teens you interviewed dropped out of high school.
What were they thinking?
“There’s a real ambivalence about education. They didn’t see the effects of having
an education from the people around them — most of their role models do not
have an education. So they can’t see algebra as an entry to a good job. It would
take something like Big Brothers and Big Sisters to demonstrate, on a personal
level, what school can do for you. I don’t know if there’s enough capacity for those
programs to help everyone.
“The question is, how do you get young people to invest in education without
making them feel they’re devaluing what their parents do? They felt they had to put
their parents down.
50
INSIGHTS FROM ‘REIMAGINING
INTERVENTION IN YOUNG LIVES’
1. Efforts to “fix” floundering young people most often
fail:
“The idea that human lives are predictable, and
that they can be successfully corrected by outside
intervention, is flawed against the evidence…
Rather… many young people resist, ignore or
negotiate with state interventions, dominant
institutions, and — because they are not oblivious to
them — the normal pathways to work.”
2. Terms like “vulnerable” and “at-risk” show that
society doesn’t give enough credit to how competently
even floundering youth can steer their own path, given
the chance:
“The ‘at risk’ designation justifies pre-emptive
interventions, because it implies that delinquency,
deviance and undesirable life outcomes can be
predicted before they happen, and thus can be
prevented with the right methods.”
3. Historically, the urge to fix street-involved young
people has filled a psychological need for some in the
middle class. It says more about the fixers than the
fixees.
“Whereas the focus in the 18th century was largely
on sexuality and gender norms, the normative aim in
[this period is] the creation of productive bodies —
wage workers and workers in training — that support
the demands of capitalist economies.”
“It has to hurt. I can’t imagine feeling this way. This is something
sociologists have been talking about forever — the middle class bent of
the school system, and how to change that.”
If programs such as OYE and other employment- and educationbased interventions are not the solution, what is?
“Empirical evidence points to the effectiveness of intensive measures
such as ‘housing first’ homelessness strategies [stabilizing streetinvolved youth by providing a safe, affordable, home before asking them
to seek addictions counselling, apply for a job, or pursue education].
These forms of social assistance seem expensive in the short-run, but
they are proven to get people off the streets and into jobs (if [the youth]
can work), and out of the cycle of dependence on social assistance, so
the lifelong costs are minimal compared to the costs of lifelong income
support.”
51
McJobs, a Launch Pad for Young Workers
Employees of a BC burger joint share hopes, fears and life lessons.
counter, and the restaurant’s Gen X owners — represent B.C.’s uncertain
future, where class, race, globalization and age all combine to tell a
complicated tale. They’re not classifiable as “at risk” or “vulnerable.”
Nor are they the kids who more often show up in articles about tough
transitions in Canada: neither the most vulnerable, nor the young but
unemployed university grads.
These are B.C.’s mainstream youth, “middle class” by family income
standards.
With scant opportunities in the resource sector that traditionally offered
good wages straight out of high school, how are they managing the
transition from adolescent economic dependence to self-supporting
adulthood?
They can be derided as junk jobs, but for many young British Columbians, days
behind a fast-food counter offer the first steps toward grown-up stability. Server
photo via Shutterstock.
The oniony, greasy smell of deep fryer oil wafts through the airconditioned air inside the strip mall chain fast-food restaurant. Outside
it’s hot and dry and the over-bright summer sun blasts the parking lot.
Several cars are lined up at the drive-thru and a trickle of customers
visits the counter seeking late afternoon snacks.
This joint is located at the outer reaches of the Lower Mainland, in
a small city where family incomes are slightly below the provincial
average (because this is a small place where privacy is scarce, The Tyee
agreed to conceal the name of the location). Nearby are farms, a reserve,
a mill, and the remains of several utopian communes. Life is pleasant
here. People work at it. Not least, those who are working here.
The workers at this burger joint — both the Gen Y youth behind the
Let’s meet some of them.
The responsible family man
It’s 4 p.m. and Grant, 25, has just finished an eight-hour shift toasting
buns and frying chicken. He joins me at a table in the restaurant while
his wife and kids — a three-year-old boy and a one-year-old girl — wait
in their silver beater car outside. His bright blue eyes are run through
with red over his scruffy young man’s beard, and his tight skin gleams.
He’s chugging orange pop from a water bottle.
“I don’t see working in fast food. I see working full time,” Grant says,
after telling me he’s worked here for one year this week. Before that, he’d
patched together part-time jobs in a corner store, at Walmart, mowing
53
lawns, and teaching guitar to support his family. This is the first job
that’s offered him full-time hours.
payment. It’s too tight, Grant notes — a mistake he says he hopes not to
repeat.
“Seeing my dad with one job for his entire life, that’s how I figured out
that it doesn’t matter what job you have,” he tells me. “It matters that you
take care of the people you love.”
So far, Grant says, he’s learned three things.
His dad worked for the mill, a once-flourishing local employer now
down to a bare-bones staff. Grant would like to apply for one of its few
remaining entry-level union jobs, but he doesn’t have the required high
school diploma.
Shuttled with his older brother between their separated parents’ houses,
he says he endured beatings from his bigger sibling during unsupervised
hours. Short and scrawny as a youngster, he was an easy target for
primary school peers to pick on as well, he said; it made him timid.
Then, in Grade 9, he could barely get out of bed. His body craved sleep.
And food. He missed the bulk of his classes because of the symptoms of
a growth spurt that added 14 inches to his height. No longer was he the
smallest kid in his class, but now he was seriously behind his classmates.
A change in B.C. graduation requirements, which would have forced
him to re-take much of Grade 9 as prerequisites, thwarted his effort to
catch up and finish high school. He gave up.
By 19 he was working part time, building model war figures and
learning to play guitar. He was also drinking too much. After a
roommate kicked him out, he moved in with his girlfriend. Within a
year she was pregnant. He married her “officially” before she gave birth,
and after their son was born the couple held a proper wedding, so she
could wear a traditional wedding dress.
Recently, Grant says, they took on five roommates to make ends meet,
bringing the total house count to 10. That includes his dad, who lives
downstairs and pays half the mortgage after helping them with a down
First, he’s not good with money. Working at the corner store, he believed
he figured out how to win at Keno, and spent his evenings playing and,
surprisingly, winning. In six weeks, he claims, he’d collected more than
$3,000, which he blew on several generous presents.
Second, his only regret is not learning to play the guitar earlier. He loves
it, he’s good at it, and he writes his own songs. And, he believes, it would
have helped his popularity and cut down on the bullying in high school.
Third, he believes that greater social problems stem from his generation’s
working poverty. Youth can never strike out on their own on part-time
wages. Forced to exchange dependence on their parents for dependence
on roommates, he thinks, he and his peers enjoy no chance for selfdiscovery or self-definition.
Going back to school is not on his to-do list, even though he knows how
many jobs are closed to him for lack of graduating. “I didn’t enjoy high
school,” he says. “It’s like piano lessons. I use the skills I learned, but I
don’t plan on continuing.”
From the outside, Grant’s life may seem precarious, even short-sighted.
But that misses too much. Instead, the young family man has built a
life around music, steady work, the dignity of responsibility, and an
appreciation for being surrounded by people who love him.
The quiet Aboriginal superstar
Rose, 20, meets me at a coffee shop on her way out of town. She’s
jangling a handful of keys: one of them is to her new basement suite
three hours away. She’s on her way to move in. Petite with a broad, soft
face and very straight, thick hair, Rose is no-nonsense. She’s about to
enter her second year in indigenous studies at a Victoria college, aiming
54
for a degree in social work. Her boyfriend — and roommate — is
studying indigenous business leadership.
grants — 15 years ago, she explains. “I just pay for food and rent and
laundry, and that’s about what it covers,” she says.
Growing up on the reserve, Rose was surrounded by peers who weren’t
as driven as she was. Now, she says, many of them are floundering: not
skilled enough to find decent work, but too frightened to leave home for
school.
For Rose, working in fast food is about more than money. Dealing with
people when their order is wrong and they get mad forces her “to think
about what to say, about how to fix things,” she says.
So what made the difference between her and her peers?
“I think it just has to do with their parents. Mine made sure we were
awake, and that we were getting ready for school. They drove us to
school if we missed the bus. In First Nations communities, a lot of
parents are too involved in their own life to think about the kids,” she
says without judgment.
Rose’s mom went to college; she’s a kindergarten teacher. Her father
works as a logger and serves on the band council. Both of her older
sisters went to university. Her younger brother is planning to get his
bachelor of sciences.
Rose, who was a very shy child, credits some of her willingness to
pursue a life off the reserve to an exchange program in Grade 9. She
was chosen to live overseas with a French family. Succeeding in such
a profoundly different environment and forming a bond with her
host family, she recalls, allowed her to open up. After graduation, she
returned and stayed with her French family for the entire summer.
“I feel like growing up happened really fast,” she says. “I didn’t have time
to process it. After Europe, I came back just in time to move out [for
first year at college]. I didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye to
friends.”
She’s spent this summer as a cashier, and saved every minimum-wage
penny. Between her summer earnings, shared rent, and the grants her
Indian status allows her, she’ll manage to scrape by at school. But money
is much tighter now than when her sister went to college — on the same
It’s a skill she expects to need in her planned career. Rose’s aunt is a
social worker on the local reserve, and has warned her it can be very
stressful.
“I just want to help people in any way I can,” says Rose. “I want to be
remembered by the way I helped even one person in a significant way.”
The once competitive gymnast hopeful
Immediately after her last shift ever, Maria, 19, shed her drive-thru head
set and polyester uniform, got into denim short-shorts and a violet
top, and ran across the parking lot to visit her boyfriend, a barista at
Starbucks. She graduated high school with the class of 2012, and has
been working the take-out window ever since.
But next week she’s off for an eight-month esthetics course: hair
styling, massage, skin care, make-up and nails. It’s a ticket to travel
and work anywhere, even at resorts, she says. She doesn’t know how
much esthetics pays, but she doesn’t care either. It’s fun work. She loves
fashion.
Maria’s parents divorced when she was six. Her father is a paramedic
and her mom a medical secretary. They pushed their kids to succeed.
Maria’s older brother has his carpentry ticket.
At age six, Maria began a competitive gymnastics career that took her
within sight of the national team. She was a favourite coach at the club
and it was a great job, for a while.
Then one day two years ago, dismounting off the parallel bars, she
landed with a straight leg and hyperextended her knee. It was never the
same. Now, a build-up of knee cartilage means her competitive years are
over.
“Everyone thought I’d be a teacher,” she said, mentioning jubilantly that
she’d loved high school. “I was a really good gymnastics coach. But after
six years, I was sick of teaching.”
Esthetics, a practical career that suits her interests — with a short and
affordable course — appeals now. This fall, Maria and her boyfriend
will both be going to the same school, where he’s planning to become a
nurse.
“Moving away from home is scary,” she reports. “Oh my god! Sometimes
I wonder what I am doing. I had a hard time after I graduated. I didn’t
know what to do. Taking a year off really helped.”
Salaries tend to be dismal for estheticians, especially without advanced
training. But it’s likely Maria will figure that out and jump to the next
thing — and probably nail her landing.
The last lucky generation
The chain restaurant franchise belongs to Nadia and Mike. They’re both
38, and have three kids, the oldest one in university. That’s right: spring
break of her Grade 12 year, Nadia had her first baby.
It was 1992. Despite the socially dreaded “teen pregnancy,” and unlike
Grant, Rose or the other kids who work for them now, Mike and Nadia
were making enough back then to start an independent life.
To take care of his new family Mike got a job at the mill. The money
was great: he was pulling in $3,000 a month, after taxes, with no postsecondary school. Nadia stayed home to look after their daughter. For a
time, life was straightforward.
55
She worked as a cashier in a fast food restaurant while he finished his
accounting diploma. Money was tight and their family support was 200
kilometres away.
At 18, Nadia clued in to how important income is to family stability. “I
realized what money stress is,” she says. “Do I hate you [Mike]? Or is it
just money stress?”
Even after her husband started working for the federal government,
their finances were stretched to the limit. Between rent, utilities,
groceries and one car, every penny disappeared.
“This was in the era before credit cards and cell phones [were universal
accessories]. Things were simpler then,” says Mike. He notes that his
young employees spend heavily on cell phones and travel, luxuries that
were beyond his dreams until recently. “Now there’s all that money that
just pours out on a daily basis.”
Two more kids later, the young family moved home to this small city
where houses are cheaper and opportunity wide open. In 2007, they
bought the restaurant franchise.
A front-row seat to Gen-Y angst
At an age when many Vancouver parents are strolling their first baby
around the Seawall in a Bugaboo, Mike and Nadia are nearing the finish
line. At work however, they feel they’re perpetually parenting their
motley crew of late teens and aspiring young adults.
It’s a very different generation from their own, they report, with very
different struggles. For one thing, Nadia says, “When I started working,
whatever your boss asked you to do, you did… I asked one new
employee to do the dishes the other day. He said, ‘No, I don’t feel like it.’
Then Mike got laid off.
“We fired a kid recently; he said he’d rather argue with us about his job
than actually work.”
The duo moved across the Lower Mainland so Mike could go to school.
Firings are rare, though. Nadia and Mike see their role as many teens’
first boss to be one of mentorship. But Nadia has had to pull back in
frustration from her initial impulse to help the most troubled kids.
The couple has hired several former and current foster kids, but none
stayed long. Nadia recalls one young woman whom she hired in spite
of a pierced and shabby appearance. She kept the teen on even when
she showed up drunk for several shifts. Nadia finally had to let the girl
go when she punched through a window at the restaurant after a fight
with her boyfriend — but only after she drove her ex-employee to the
hospital.
They hired another young man in the foster care system, but his home
life was so unstable he wasn’t reliably appearing at work, and they
eventually lost track of him. Yet another foster kid started work, but
stopped showing up for her shifts.
She says they’ve also seen an influx of job applicants with autism and
other diagnoses: ADHD, epilepsy, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
Some have worked out as employees. A cook in his mid-30s has
Asperger’s syndrome, which they’ve been able to help him manage
at work. Another older employee, a former foster kid, overcame fetal
alcohol syndrome to become a manager, but was eventually let go when
his own alcoholism affected his work.
But in Nadia’s view, simply getting kids working — especially in a busy,
typical first job — would go a long way to getting Gen Y past its failure
to launch.
“It teaches them how to manage their money, what life is like, it gets
them over the idea that life is easy,” she notes. “The school system and
parents can do a better job, simply by letting them fail every once in a
while.”
56
For Residential School Kids, a Legacy of Sex Abuse
Native leaders hope Truth and Reconciliation hearings will break the cycle of violence.
Society. He seems, on the surface, like a walking advertisement for
getting over it.
Adams was the first of his siblings not be sent to residential school.
Instead, he was raised by grandparents before being boarded out for
high school. He went directly from there to Langara College, where
he began studying social work. Eventually he earned degrees from
UBC and UVIC. For the past 40 years, he’s worked in youth outreach,
in social work, and in administration with the Urban Native Youth
Association and Circle of Eagles. His wife, his children and his
grandchildren have not been abused, he volunteers.
The residential school in Port Alberni, one of the most notorious, operated for more
than half a century from 1920 to 1973.
Jerry Adams hears “Just get over it,” a lot. He hears it from some young
aboriginal kids who say they’re sick of talking about their grandparents’
residential school experiences. He hears it from some non-native people,
dismissive of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),
which is coming to the PNE Coliseum in Vancouver Sept. 18 to 21 to
record the stories of residential school survivors and their descendants.
Just get over the past. Get over residential schools.
“We’re trying to,” he says, laughing, in his office on East Broadway, on
the main floor of a no-frills three-story apartment building decorated
with aboriginal art and smelling of freshly-baked buns.
Adams, 63, a stocky, cheerful former social worker and member of the
Nisga’a Nation, is the executive director of the Circle of Eagles Lodge
Adams holds a wall of awards recognizing his work. Still, he admits
that he doesn’t know how he was able to break the cycle while so many
people he works with and loves seem trapped. They’re good people, he
notes, who are struggling with pervasive, multigenerational horrors.
Speaking only for his own experience, he said, it is the love of his
grandparents and his extended family in his home village of Aiyansh
that fill him with strength.
“Healing can’t come from anyone else but our people,” said Adams.
“Parents teaching their kids that abuse is not okay.”
That can be hard, he adds, when for so many aboriginal people abuse
is so close it’s still raw. His own brother survived horrific abuse, Adams
said, but still won’t talk about it. His niece committed suicide.
“It’s really trying to unlearn the cycles, and be understanding that there
is a possibility for us to be healed. It’s so hard for us to trust one another
still. Abuse has affected so many of us directly.”
58
Disturbing pattern of sex abuse
WHEN VICTIMS BECOME THE CRIMINALS
Circle of Eagles is a home for aboriginal men transitioning out of prison. Some
are sex offenders. Their crimes have usually been against the women and children
closest to them, Adams said, which often leads to social workers taking their own
kids away. The residents will be among those paddling from Kits Point to Science
World as part of an All Nations Canoe Gathering to mark the TRC’s hearings. They
are part of the community as well as part of the story.
Many speakers at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings
are expected to be “intergenerational survivors” —
people who didn’t attend residential school themselves,
but whose lives have been affected by the scars that
parents, grandparents and communities bear from
the residential school experience. Their testimony
will shed light on the ongoing connection between
abuse suffered at residential schools and the myriad
social problems plaguing First Nations communities,
including aboriginal over-representation in foster care.
Some facts:
Sexual abuse is a leading reason for government child protection services to become
involved in a family, which often results in the removal of kids. About one in 35
kids whom social workers confirm has been abused has also been sexually violated.
Many more, Adams and others suggest, are never officially reported.
Adams is not sure how widespread incest and sexual violence are among First
Nations in B.C., but he’s sure they are much more common than most people are
ready to acknowledge.
“There are programs [for sexual offenders] in institutions, but it doesn’t stop it,” he
said.
He hopes story telling at the TRC this week will begin to crack open the
conversation. But he also acknowledges that it will take time over generations before
the community washes itself clean of the effects of chronic abuse.
Abductions then and now
Fifteen years ago, Sto:lo Nation activist Ernie Crey and journalist Suzanne Fournier
wrote the book, Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children
and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. It was among the first to make
the argument that provincial foster care has become the residential school of the
modern era.
In the book, Crey also suggested that stopping the chronic incest plaguing so many
communities is the key to ending mass apprehensions of aboriginal children. Stop
abusing them, he says in effect, and government will stop taking them away.
Unlike much child protection thinking in North America whose guiding
• In B.C., about five per cent of the population is
aboriginal.
• Nationally, aboriginal children represent about 22
per cent of child protection investigations when
abuse is suspected. Social workers are four
times more likely to find substantiation for an
allegation of abuse of an aboriginal child than for
allegations of abuse of non-aboriginal children.
• In B.C., just over half of kids in the care of the
Ministry of Children and Families are aboriginal.
• Of street youth in B.C., 54 per cent are
aboriginal In Vancouver, the figure rises to nearly
two thirds (65 per cent). Forty per cent of kids
on the street have spent time in foster care. More
than a third said they’d been sexually exploited
and 15 per cent already had a child of their own.
principal is “the best interests of the child,” Crey and Adams focus on
helping adults – especially those sexual offenders who were victims
themselves.
“The community has never gone
through a deep healing process to make
it safe for men who were abused and
men who became offenders to come
forward and disclose and get healed,”
a man called Peter Joe told Crey and
Fournier in Stolen from our Embrace.
“Behind all the alcoholism and drug
abuse, the family violence; men are
hurting pretty bad. You know, all those
scenes [in residential school] come back
to me, the beatings and being so scared,
in my nightmares and even when I’m
awake.”
59
Development to separate family support programs from the function of
taking children into foster care. Lifting the threat of child removal, he
says, will rebuild trust and ultimately offer families and communities the
help they need.
For his part, Adams proposes two approaches to ending the cycle of
violence and apprehensions. Some people are able to make a personal
decision to change their behaviour for themselves and their own
families. Many of his staff, he said, have made that choice and been able
to maintain it.
But abuse is not an individual problem either, he insists. It’s a shared
legacy of a dark era, a community-scale problem that demands
community action. He urges a community return to the power of
traditional spirituality: the drum, gatherings and dances.
Jerry Adams works with
aboriginal men, many of
them sex offenders, who are
transitioning out of prison.
At least one notable change has taken
place since Crey and Fournier’s book
was published, but perhaps not entirely for the better. The province has
handed much of B.C.’s child protection work over to aboriginal agencies.
Formerly, most of these offered family support only, an approach that
Crey believes had been working.
While Crey certainly supports the principal of aboriginals administering
child protection, he says that mixing their mandate to include the power
to remove kids introduced a distrust that has undermined their efforts.
“Parents don’t trust the agencies because they deliver both support and
apprehensions,” Crey told the Tyee Solutions Society. “What was once a
helping agency now has a dual role.”
Breaking the silence
Crey believes the only way to restore lost confidence is for both
aboriginal agencies and the provincial Ministry of Children and Family
Both men suggest that a critical first step is simply the acknowledgment
that incest and sexual violence are widespread in aboriginal
communities, and stem from a multigenerational cycle of abuse that
started in residential schools.
That work has a chance to continue this weekend, as the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission listens to the stories of those who survived
the residential schools, and now are struggling to rebuild lives and
families.
First Strokes of Justice at Reconciliation Hearings
Though with many Aboriginal kids still in foster care, much work for healing remains.
opened its work at Vancouver’s Coliseum, hearing testimony from
residential school survivors and their descendants. The national event,
which ends Saturday, includes testimony from survivors, workshops
and panels, a marketplace with stunning crafts and fashions, and other
activities. It’s free and anyone can attend.
While the Commission’s aim is to hear the stories of the survivors,
record them and report back, there will still be much more work to do
to achieve justice for Aboriginal people in Canada upon its conclusion.
More than 150,000 Aboriginal children were separated from their
families during the residential school era, which ended in 1996. Today,
some advocates say, more Aboriginal kids and teens are in foster care in
Canada than at any time residential schools operated. There are 4,000
Aboriginal children currently in foster care in British Columbia alone.
Fixing the child protection system itself is only a small part of ending
the mass apprehensions of Aboriginal children, according to Justice Ted
Hughes’ major review of child protection services in 2006.
Keith Morriseau, a residential school survivor, stands outside the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission doors in Vancouver on Sept. 18.
Photo by Pieta Woolley.
Wrapped in a blanket with a Canadian flag on one side and “Jesus
Christ” on the other, Keith Morriseau from the Sagkeeng First Nation
in Manitoba stood outside Vancouver’s Pacific National Coliseum
yesterday morning. Morriseau is a residential school survivor, and this
week he reconnected with his niece, who was taken into foster care
as a small child. To him and many survivors, the connection between
residential school and foster care is obvious.
On Wednesday, Sept. 18, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
“The challenge facing us all is to reduce the number of Aboriginal
children who are at risk of harm by finding ways to make sure their
families and communities are in a position to keep their children safe
and well,” he wrote. “It seems clear by now that the answers do not lie
wholly, or evenly mainly, in the child protection system. Rather, the
solutions lie in building strong, economically viable and culturally
robust communities.”
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Seeking justice many ways
To seek justice and repair communities and families, 79,000
residential school survivors sued the Canadian government and won
a 2005 settlement, which included funding for the three-year nongovernmental Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The aim of the Commission is to hear the stories of the survivors, record
them and report back. It wraps up in June 2014, though other lawsuits
continue.
At the Vancouver event’s opening ceremonies, National Chief of the
Assembly of First Nations Shawn Atleo drew attention to two current
child protection fights: the 16,000-person class action lawsuit on behalf
of Ontario Aboriginal kids taken into care in the “60s scoop,” and
the human rights tribunal asking for equitable funding for child welfare
on reserves, which resumes on Sept. 23.
“In these many ways, we are working to ensure justice for our people,”
Atleo said to a cheering crowd.
Justice may also be found in healing relationships. For example,
the United, Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic churches that ran
schools on behalf of the government have now become partners in the
reconciliation movement.
In the Agrodome at the Commission this week, the churches’ archivists
are showing thousands of photographs of children at the schools. Many
people who came to witness the opening ceremonies were ministers and
priests wearing clerical collars.
Paddling forward
While the Coliseum was just half-filled for the opening event, the shores
of False Creek were lined with thousands of reconciliation supporters
for Tuesday’s All Nations Canoe Gathering. Paddlers left Vanier Park at
10 a.m. and journeyed to Creekside Park.
Paddlers at Tuesday’s All Nations Canoe Gathering. Photo by Pieta Woolley.
The Squamish, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Circle of Eagles Canoes
arrived first. International canoes carrying Aboriginal guests from as
far away as Australia and Papua New Guinea arrived next. Ornatelydecorated canoes from Semiahmoo, Sechelt, Sliammon, and other
North American nations arrived, followed finally by canoes representing
churches, non-profits, and civic groups. A low-key David Suzuki could
be spotted paddling, too.
The canoes were cheered on by students from Elsie Roy Elementary,
Charles Dickens Elementary, and False Creek Elementary, plus
administration from the BC Teachers’ Federation. Many teachers
have brought reconciliation into their classrooms, and education
resources are also available online.
At the gathering, five-year-old Kaylana Charlie, of the Lummi Nation
near Bellingham, bravely sang a traditional song into a microphone to
the thousands gathered around Science World. The crowd whooped and
hollered.
The image of her singing, a beacon of the promise of reconciliation,
stood in stark contrast to an announcement earlier Tuesday by
B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth. In her latest report,
representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond found that governments
in B.C. and Saskatchewan had once again failed to protect a young
Aboriginal girl in the child welfare system.
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BC parents support extending foster
care from 19 to 21: survey
Technically they’re adults. But they’re helpless.
That’s what most British Columbians think about the average 19-yearold’s ability to live alone and support him or herself independently.
In a survey released today by the Vancouver Foundation, 1,820 adults
talked frankly about how much support they give their own kids, versus
what kind of support they’d extend to B.C.’s former foster kids.
homelessness would be reduced by offering former foster youth housing,
education funding, and mental health supports.
When the foster care system boots these youth out at 19, half go on
income assistance soon after. Many land on the streets. About 40 per
cent of street-involved youth have spent some time in foster care, and
an unknown number of their families have been impacted by the child
protection system.
It’s a swish gig, being a young adult with a compassionate parent.
Unlike other generations of teens who found decent work in the
province’s forests, farms, and fisheries, many of today’s youth depend on
their parents to the age of 28.
For example, a quarter of a million of B.C.’s 19- to 28-year-olds live at
home. That represents four in 10, many of whom who benefit from free
groceries and rent, advice and paid tuition. Among those living away
from home, 80 per cent of parents say they give their adult children
money for rent or education, or other supports.
“The survey results underline how deep and important family and
close relationships are to success,” said Mark Gifford, the Vancouver
Foundation’s director of grants and community initiatives. “And
how important those relationships are to people in the transfer of
opportunity.”
Those surveyed said they’d support extending foster care from the
current cut-off at age 19, to age 21 — as many U.S. states have done,
with measurable benefits.
However, the survey also found that most respondents didn’t think
First published October 9th, 2013
Fostering Truth: Uncovering Life Experiences
What’s the deal for British Columbian kids who’ve been in “the system”
— that collection of welfare, justice and child-protection agencies that
intervene in thousands of young lives every year — once those kids
graduate from public support at age 19?
her behavior grew worse as she became angrier and more frustrated
with the separation from her family. Natalie was then placed with her
grandmother, then her mother; neither could contain her outbursts. At
13, she was sent to a group home.
Some make it on to university. Most don’t.
That’s when the violence started. Twice a day, she said, the staff would
disappear for an hour, locking themselves in an office for “checkin.” During that time, the kids would beat each other. Natalie recalls
barricading herself in her room, back against the door, feet tensed
against her bed, to keep the other kids out. She also recalls being
punched until she fell, then kicked when she was down. She was at the
bottom of the food chain, she says.
Woolley collaborated with a volunteer team of digital designers from
Vancouver Film School — Kayla Cherkas, Sebastian Guerrero, and
Sandra Tirado — to produce an interactive exploration of some of those
young people’s stories, and the factors that have influenced them. The
interactive feature can be found at http://fosteringtruth.tyeesolutions.org/;
the transcript is below.
Natalie
Natalie was never sure why Alberta’s social workers took her from her
home.
Sure, at 10, she was fighting with her mom. But what pre-teen isn’t?
Blue-eyed, with a pixie presence, the now-26-year-old is working hard
to make sure her four-year-old daughter never has to endure what she
has. Natalie lives in a B.C. Housing apartment in Vancouver. She works
cleaning restaurants. She’d like to become a naturopath one day.
In spite of some disabilities — she has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder, anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress from her time on the street,
and is a recovering heroin addict — she has participated in nearly every
outreach program for at-risk youth. A striking mix of Ojibwe, Italian
and English, with a flash of pink hair, Natalie is a beautiful, sharp, and
accessible former kid in care.
Her first foster home was fine, she reports, until her foster mom had
her dog put down. The second and third ones were also fine — though
At 15, she started to run away, or “go AWOL,” back to her mom’s house.
Not welcome there, she hooked up with a boyfriend who taught her
how to survive on the street. The next year, she became pregnant, had
a miscarriage, and was taken into custody when she checked in to the
hospital for the surgery. For the next two years, she lived behind high
walls in forced treatment. When she was released at age 18 she fled to
Vancouver’s Granville Street.
The Granville strip has long been a mix of runaways, former kids in
care and other youth from Surrey, North Vancouver and other suburbs,
attracted by the “glamour” of street life, Natalie explains.
“They don’t understand, they’ve never woken up shivering.”
At 22, when she got pregnant with Mimi, the social workers started
swarming again. Now, she said, they’re nearly gone — just on hand to
offer support, such as paying for childcare.
“If I had not gone through everything — if I’d just stayed at home [and
not been apprehended] — I don’t think I’d have ever been on the street,”
Natalie says, acknowledging that her family could have used some
family counseling or parenting classes. “I would not have been beaten
up in the group home. I had a good group of friends at home — before
they switched me out to another school. I think I would have had a
better life. I wouldn’t have half the problems I do now.”
Kevin
Sometimes as he walks along East Hastings Street and beyond, Kevin is
transported back to Red Deer, Alberta. The sulfur smell of train tracks
reminds him of playing in the forest behind his foster home. The scent
of a certain kind of lotion women wear recalls for him his first foster
mother. Old cars and trees, the smell of escaping when home got too
rough.
He doesn’t miss it. His biological mom gave him up as an infant.
Beatings and hunger is what he remembers from his first foster home,
where he lived until age 12.
“I was a really good hockey player,” he recalled over tea at the Waves
coffee shop on Main and Cordova in Vancouver.
“I was a good goalie, a good forward. And a good student. I’d read books
every day, all day. I was just out of control. Didn’t take any crap from
no one. That showed in school, where I’d get into fights. No one ever
figured out what was going on at home though. They just thought I was
a bad kid.”
After one especially terrible beating, which left bloody welts from
his neck to his hips, he left for good, stole money and took a bus to
Edmonton. A cop found him, saw his back, and sent him to a group
home. But he continued to fight.
That got him bounced around from group home to group home. For
escape, he read constantly. Finally, at a friend’s house, he met a wealthy
family from West Vancouver. They agreed to foster him, and he flew to
the West Coast to a new home in the British Properties.
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“I remember coming home from school and they’d have all this stuff out
to make sandwiches,” Kevin said. “I could eat whatever I liked. To this
day, I still love grilled cheese.”
But it wouldn’t last. Fighting at school and some low-level petty crime
got him a one-way ticket back to Edmonton. Walking away from the
airport, he was picked up by a group of men in a limo. Thanks to his
pocket knife, he narrowly escaped a rape.
That’s when he hit the streets. He was 15. Since then, he’s lived in
Edmonton and Vancouver, on the street, in shelters and in prison.
Eva
Eva survived a schizophrenic mother, an abusive step-father who
threw her out of her home at 14, a suicide attempt, and less-than-ideal
foster-care placements — but graduated from high school and went on
to college. She’s never been homeless, or addicted to drugs, and she’s
employed and self-supporting. Now, she speaks out about foster care at
international conferences; she’s about to earn a degree so she can be a
children’s advocate. In other words, she seems very resilient. But don’t
let any of that fool you.
“People sometimes ask me how I turned out okay,” Eva said. “Well,
maybe I didn’t. The word ‘resilient’ is a double-edged sword. When I’ve
been labeled ‘resilient,’ it stopped me from getting help.
“It’s that profile — the sweet kid in foster care — that’s wrong. It’s
not enough to look at someone’s smile and think they’re fine. They
are screaming on the inside.” Dividing foster kids into those that are
resilient and those who are not is false, Eva said. The abuse — sexual
or physical — or neglect that lead a child into the system, the shame
associated with being in the system, and the trauma of losing family
and identity, affect nearly every child touched by the system, she argues.
Yes, foster kids can be strong. But that’s not the same as resilience —
bouncing back and acting “normal” in spite of their experiences.
Eva’s family fell apart in her Grade 8 year. A self-described “nerd,” she
started high school in a class for gifted students. A few months in, as
conflict with her stepfather rose, she was skipping most classes and her
grades plummeted. She wondered why no one seemed to notice. She
stopped caring, she said. “I was in survival mode.” After she tried to kill
herself, one teacher came to see her in the hospital, bearing a gift: Man’s
Search for Meaning, by Victor E. Frankl, concentration camp survivor.
“I thought it was my fault that I was struggling, because I was stupid or
crazy,” she remembers.
She spent most of her teens in foster care — a string of emotionally
empty placements. After she ‘aged out’ of care at 19, she stayed with
a friend’s family. While she was able to finish high school and start
university, the smiling, “resilient”, attractive girl broke down in her early
20s.
“For me, aging out of care was like those [Wile E. Coyote] cartoons: he
runs off a cliff, and he’s still running even though there’s nothing under
him. The moment he looks down, that’s when he falls. It’s not overly
dramatic to say I had a complete existential crisis.” Leaving college, and
a string of bad boyfriends, led to some dark nights, she said.
“It wasn’t until I started volunteering and meeting people who had
been through what I had, that I started to heal,” she said. “Victor Frankl
survived the concentration camp by believing that his suffering had
been for something. For me, from there, everything just clicked into
place.” Eva started a support group for teens with parents who suffer
from mental illness. She found her meaning. But Eva still carries the
scars of the original abuse, and the abandonment and neglect she felt in
foster care.
5hadow
When he was just seven years old, 5hadow was already parenting his
younger brother. Their mom, who had paranoid schizophrenia and
a heroin addiction, would walk out, leaving him alone with a toddler
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screaming in a high chair. 5hadow fed his brother toast and jam,
climbing up on the counter to reach the ingredients.
This changed little as they moved across the province as kids, from
Tofino to Salmon Arm to Sooke. Eventually, the boys moved in with
their dad, who had a succession of different wives. None of them
accepted the brothers. His mom disappeared.
Finally, in his mid-teens, 5hadow was diagnosed with bipolar disorder,
a mental illness that’s treatable with drugs — though the drugs made
him lazy and fat, he says, unable to complete high school. He developed
a video gaming addiction and his weight ballooned to 118 kg. Then
his dad kicked him out and tried to get the government to pay for a
youth agreement (an independent living contract worth about $1,100 a
month) for him.
“I was a living hell to raise,” he admits.
The ministry refused, so 5hadow was placed in a group home. There, he
met several teens whom he still considers to be his foster brothers and
sisters. He didn’t mind the place.
But when staff found that he had stolen a police Taser he was kicked out.
Just turning 19 and with no life skills, he recalls, he was ushered out the
door. Since then 5hadow has bounced between friends’ couches, squats,
jail, the street and low-rent hotel rooms. Now, he spends most days
standing on Vancouver’s Granville Street, rapping into a portable sound
system, hoping for spare change. He gets a disability pension of just over
$900 a month, but his intense behavior, he says, gets him kicked out of
most places.
At 22, he’s gorgeous. Just over 6’2” and 220 pounds, with broad, Dutch
shoulders, 5hadow has the long, lean build of a runner — though he
can’t run anymore. His sandy hair stands on end, and his blue eyes fade
in and out. Sometimes, he is sharp and witty. Then he seems to crawl
into himself and disappear. He’s angry with his dad for being such a
flaky role model. If he had been more interested in parenting, 5hadow
believes, he would have made it through high school and beyond.
In another life, he says, he would like to study psychology and literature.
He’s written a novel. He has also stopped taking the meds that control
his bipolar disorder. “I’m a heavy down here on the street scene,” he
says. “I consider myself a jester. My dad says, ‘You’re just giving them a
show. What do you get?’
I just rap about good and evil clashing. It’s what I see.”
Candi & Melissa
Sitting on a couch in a Commercial Drive social services office, Candi
seems as composed and confident as any other 30-year-old. Her long,
thick hair is brushed flat and shiny, skinny jeans and boots looking more
West End than East Side. She twists her wrist up into the light. Along
one vein are 14 tiny, raised white dots: IV scars on her sensitive skin — a
record, she said, of her many overdoses and suicide attempts.
Hearing her story, it’s easy to understand. Starting when she was a
toddler, she said, her father — himself a survivor of residential schools
— started sexually assaulting her and her brother. At seven, social
workers took her away and placed her, alone, in a foster home, where
the abuse continued.
By 13, she was back home. That’s when she started using alcohol, pot,
acid, heroin, cocaine. She dropped out of school, was sent to live in
group homes, got kicked out, hit the streets, and had her first baby at
19. Then more, one girl and two boys by the time she was 26. But in the
midst of all that, she dumped her boyfriend after he attacked her, got
clean and sober, and graduated from high school.
“The ministry is sometimes helpful,” Candi said, mentioning that social
workers often intrude, uninvited, in her raising of her own children.
“Most of the time they’re not. They criticize me a lot. They just put fear
into me — even though I’ve followed through on everything.
“When I was a child, I was never diagnosed with anything. Now
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I’m on PWD [a disability payment] because I was diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress. It makes it hard for me to deal with emotional
situations.”
Her pain is not over, though. Candi recently discovered that her
12-year-old, Melissa, is using drugs. Melissa also revealed that she too
was sexually abused, by someone in the family. Now she’s cutting the
skin on her arms. Her friends live on the street. She’s not coming home
at night. The cycle has started again. Candi lives in fear that her children
will be taken away; that they’ll be abused in foster care as she was.
She knows she’s strong. She knows she’s a fighter. But Candi’s past still
haunts her, just as it does her daughter.
“No matter what I achieve today — college, sobriety, my past still hovers
there. Sometimes when I look at myself, all I see is my inner scars. It’s
like I’m inside out.”
Kyle
From the time he was a small boy, Kyle’s mother was in constant trouble
with her drug dealers. When she didn’t have the money to pay them, she
would let them rape him as a “payment” for her debt. This arrangement
lasted from toddlerhood until he was about 12, when the family moved
from rural Chilliwack to Vancouver.
But his mom continued to beat him. Once, he said, she ripped his arm
out of its socket. Even now, one shoulder hangs lower than the other,
and his head points left. All through elementary and high school, he
would show up to class with bruises on his face and limbs. Not once, he
says, did a teacher ask him about the marks.
As a child, Kyle was never in care. It wasn’t until he was referred to a
counselor for skipping classes at 16, that his “case” was flagged. He told
his counselor that he wanted to kill his mom. That he wanted to kill
the men that came to the house for him. So the counselor sent him to
a secure psychiatric facility, where he was locked up for two weeks. His
mom told the doctors he was lying. They believed her, he says, and not
him.
When he was discharged, he refused to go home, citing abuse. So he
was offered a group home. From 16 until he ‘aged out’ at 19, he lived
in 25 placements, he reports, including time on a youth agreement
(independent living contract). Miraculously, he managed to graduate
from high school. On his 19th birthday, he was evicted from his
apartment as the Ministry of Children and Family Development was no
longer paying his rent. One week later, he spent Christmas on a mattress
on the floor of a downtown shelter, surrounded by other homeless
people, most of them high.
Now 21, Kyle is a veteran of Vancouver’s shelters, a college drop-out,
and a now-clean former addict. His income comes from welfare, and he
believes he qualifies for disability payments. His latest psych evaluation
showed that he has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and bipolar disorder. But
he is overwhelmed with the task of getting a copy of his evaluation and
finding and filling out the necessary forms.
So instead he lives with a former youth counselor, a connection to his
Aboriginal heritage. He can’t get official First Nations status, he says,
because his father’s band doesn’t want him.
He wants in, though, believing that he’s the inheritor of north coastal
masks, of hereditary dances and songs. It’s a strong tradition based on a
lineage of dignity quite different from the the horrific abuse, humiliation
and mistrust he has encountered so far in his young life.
Learn from the past
Kids and teens usually enter the foster care system for three reasons: at
home, they were neglected, physically abused, sexually abused, or all
three.
Since 2007, 1,228 B.C. children and youth have been “critically injured”
in the system — everything from innocent accident, to attempted
suicides.
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Since 2007, B.C. 534 children and youth have died either in the system
or soon after leaving care. About half of those were not from natural
causes.
Some argue that the foster care and child protection system recreates the
damage of last century’s Indian Residential Schools.
Learn from the past, argues Cindy Blackstock, and the numbers of
abused and neglected kids will plummet.
When she was in her early 20s, Cindy Blackstock worked in B.C. group
homes to earn her university tuition. She realized then, she said, that the
teens she was caring for — most of them aboriginal — had been taken
from their families into a system that was often worse than the homes
they’d left. That’s when she got angry. And when she started fighting,
with her gentle, sharp style.
In the 30 years since then Blackstock, a member of the northern
B.C. Gitksan Nation, has worked to end Canada’s 160-year legacy of
removing aboriginal children from their homes, first as a social worker
with Squamish First Nation and on the North Shore, and later in
Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.
Now, she’s the Executive Director of the First Nations Family and Child
Caring Society in Ottawa. This summer, her organization held the
federal government’s feet to the fire before a human rights tribunal.
The last of Canada’s infamous residential schools — scenes of frequent
abuse where kids were beaten simply for speaking their native language
— closed in 1996. But chronic underfunding of family services, child
protection and education on reserves, she argues, has led to yet another
generation of aboriginal kids being ripped from their families — this
time into foster care.
In B.C., more than half (53 per cent) of children in foster care are
aboriginal — ten times their presence in the population as a whole. In
2008, the Auditor General of Canada noted that aboriginal children are
six to eight times more likely to be placed in care than non-aboriginal
children.
And once there, few fare well. Half the kids on Vancouver streets
are aboriginal; four in 10 of those have been in foster care. Among
aboriginal boys who are permanent wards of the Crown B.C., fewer than
one in four graduate from high school on time.
Just like residential school, Blackstock said, foster care brings with it the
trauma of losing your family and community. And she blames the same
root cause: racial discrimination. It has to end, Blackstock says. She
believes Canada knows better and can do better. Here is more of what
she has to say:
Q: Why do you say that today’s foster care is a legacy of Canada’s
residential schools?
Blackstock: There are two major themes and connections. First, there’s
the multi-generational effects of residential schools that have created
hardships for families today. The children who attended them are now
parents. They’re lacking parental role models, and there’s neglect and
abuse and substance abuse. Their kids are apprehended by the state, just
as they were. Second, there’s the same case of dramatic underfunding
[of education and other services] of First Nations children by the
government today, as there was during the residential school era. That
underfunding has links to First Nations children being removed from
their families in numbers greater than during residential school period.
The same pattern is there, resulting in the same thing.
Q: So, should B.C. just stop apprehending aboriginal kids?
Blackstock: I’m not an idealist. I think some kids need to be in care. But
we have got to make sure that when we remove a child, we offer them a
better life.
Q: What’s a better vision?
Blackstock: Ninety per cent of kids aging out of care go back to their
families. We need to support them in having good relations with their
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families. We shouldn’t be divorcing them from their family. They’re
worthy of building positive relationships in their life. So that when they
go back home, they can say, ‘You know mom, I don’t want to be around
you when you’re using crack. But I still love you.’ People are too quick
to judge these families. Every family has a crazy relative in it. Even the
best parent will get frustrated and struggle. The difference is, most of us
are people who have their basic needs met: clean water, nutritious food
in the fridge, warm house. In a community where there’s no water or
sewer, where education is underfunded — it makes parenting that much
harder.
Q: In B.C., 53 per cent of kids in care are aboriginal. That’s a really
appalling statistic.
What would you say to those who think First Nations just need to
get it together, and fix their own families and communities – without
relying on government?
Blackstock: Too often we hear, “Just pull [your]selves up from
bootstraps.” That assumes that aboriginal people have the same
opportunities to succeed as other Canadians. I worked for the Squamish
Nation [as a social worker] and I worked for the province just across
the street. I was flabbergasted by the change, just by walking across
the street. At Squamish, there were high voltage lines over the child
protection office that sparked when it rained. People were expected to go
in. There was nothing for family support. This was a nation that invested
its own revenues to top up the federal funds. I did child protection in
West Vancouver, too, and I never had to go knocking on doors and ask
people to top up the budget. Some people say remoteness contributes
to the problems. That’s a bogus argument. You’re only remote until they
find diamonds under you, then you’ll have politicians eating seal meat
up where you are. I say, your best natural resource is kids. That’s what
you should be investing in. For conservatives who say ‘You need to pull
yourselves up by the bootstraps,’ I say, ‘It’s in your interest to fix this.
You’re setting yourselves up for increased crime, increased mental health
[illness] rates, when you’re not paying attention to these social gaps.’
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Q: What should policy makers have learned from the residential
school experience?
Blackstock: Provide a wider array of supports so families can stay
together. End poverty, improve housing, fund education equitably.
Blackstock: One of my great heroes is Peter Henderson Bryce. He was
a physician recruited by the Department of Indian Affairs to conduct a
study in 1904 about what was happening in residential schools. At one
school, he found a death rate [of] 24 per cent in the first year. Over three
years, it was 40 per cent. He came back and said, the horrible news is
the death rates. But the good news is, the vast majority are tuberculosis
deaths. And we know how to fix that. Provide better nutrition, improve
ventilation; don’t exhaust them through servitude; don’t put sick kids
in with healthy kids. The government never implemented his reforms.
He left his post in 1922, after writing letters and letters calling for
improvements in residential schools. When he retired, he wrote a
book called The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health
Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921 — that’s where he
does his public rant about “My god, what are they doing?” So it is really
clear that people of the time thought this [residential schools] was really
wrong. Still, government dismissed people bringing things forward.
Now it’s the same case: dramatic underfunding by the government,
which has links to First Nations children being removed from their
families. Canada has tried to derail [the Human Rights tribunal]
through legal loopholes. It’s the same pattern resulting in the same
thing. We knew better then, and we know better now.
In the U.S., the National Centre for Housing and Child Welfare
(NCHCW) did a pilot [project] where they reallocated child protection
funds towards housing. What they found was, they’re saving taxpayers
about 80 per cent of expenditures on social services, just by stabilizing
housing. It’s proof that most families can stay together. Allocate dollars
to housing. Although it will not happen overnight, we should see the
numbers of kids in care and the prison system decrease substantially.
Q: What would you say to aboriginal teens who are currently in foster
care and on the streets?
Blackstock: I would say, number one, there are things that you can take
responsibility for in your own life. [But] you can get involved in change.
To the kids in care and their families, I’d say, they are the very reason
why I fight so hard. The stories I heard when I was on the front lines.
When I get tired or frustrated, I think of them.
Q: What needs to change, so that the mass apprehension of aboriginal
children becomes history?
Mike Harcourt
Long before he was B.C. premier, Mike Harcourt was a kid, and he
worked entry-level jobs, just like everyone else. But unlike today, the
pay was phenomenal. It’s enough to make any chicken-frying, tuitionborrowing member of Gen Y drool. After stints as a golf caddy, a gas
jockey, a camp counselor and a pulp mill worker, Harcourt settled into
eight years with the Canadian Pacific Railway, serving in the dining
car. For five days at a time, rolling from Vancouver to Winnipeg and
back, he earned $1.19 an hour. With tips, his take-home pay was $600 a
month – or $3,821 in 2013 dollars, adjusted for inflation.“In the 1960s,
that was pretty good dough,” Harcourt told Tyee Solutions Society.
“Tuition was $400 a year at UBC; books were $100; I had a convertible
1951 [Morris] Mini Minor and drove it all year paying for the gas, oil
and insurance. When I made $600 for four months in the summer, I
could afford all that for the year — and still have a little bit for the Fraser
Arms [Pub]. Of course, it’s all relative to where the dollar is now.” You
can say that again. An unskilled young adult earning a year’s worth of
living and schooling expenses in four months of work? In 2013 that’s as
rare as a Sasquatch sighting.
The median income today for 20- to 24-year-olds in greater Vancouver
is just $983 a month — adjusted for inflation, a quarter of what the
then-unskilled Harcourt was making. Twenty-five to 34-year-olds make
71
$2,775 a month on average — and that includes those whiz-kids with
medical degrees and trades tickets. With incomes like these, it’s small
wonder nearly half of this group today lives with their parents. The
era Harcourt grew up in represents a Golden Age compared to today’s
employment desert. Fifty years ago, B.C.’s resource sector offered plenty
of well-paying jobs to youth without post-secondary — even without
high school. No longer. Anyone wanting to fill any of the one million
jobs expected to be created in B.C. over the next decade is going to
need some kind of post-secondary certification. While the high-pay,
low-education jobs are gone, the people needing them have not. In
2013, B.C. still has plenty of unskilled young adults, kids who dropped
out of high school, dropped out of post-secondary, or took programs
at university that didn’t offer job-ready skills. In fact, one in five B.C.
teens don’t graduate high school on time — a huge swath of the general
population. One in four B.C. young adults doesn’t even register for postsecondary training (and among aboriginal youth, the number reaches
two-thirds).
gap among youth B.C.’s top challenge. “All these kids that are wandering
and directionless — that’s the biggest issue of today,” the former premier
said. “We need to give it the resources and the stature it should have.”
That, he says, means politicians, business, educators, parents and youth
all have to be involved — starting with the woman who now has his old
job. “This needs the full weight of the Premiers’ office, to bring in all
the other people to help make it happen.” B.C. is going to need its ‘lost’
generation of young workers, he says, “and they need us.”
Among those that do, 15,000 leave B.C. public universities and colleges
each year without earning the credential they enrolled for. Across B.C.,
just over half of us (52 per cent) have completed any post-secondary
certification whatsoever. And not everyone who’s together enough to
stay in school and graduate gets to use their education. At Douglas
College, for instance, 96 per cent of those who enroll graduate. Within
two years, three out of four have a full-time job. But that leaves a
quarter without full-time work in their chosen field. Among history
baccalaureate graduates from all B.C. public institutions, just one in
eight find a degree-related job within two years of picking up their
sheepskin. And grads, by and large, are the lucky ones. More than half
of kids leaving B.C.’s foster care system haven’t completed high school.
If the experience here is anything like that in the States (B.C. doesn’t
keep track) barely three out of a hundred will go on to complete a postsecondary credential.
But failure to get the training that B.C’s soaring job market demands
goes far beyond the most vulnerable. Harcourt, for one, calls the skills
Where We Go from Here
“I was told when I accepted this assignment that it
would be a straightforward task, easily accomplished
in the space of a few weeks. That turned out to be
hugely mistaken. What I have discovered…is that
child welfare is a multi-faceted system, complex in
each of its parts.”
Justice Ted Hughes, introduction to the 2006 BC Children and Youth
Review (Hughes Review)
“Fostering Nation? is not a happy book. It struggled
throughout its creation to escape submersion in the
tide of human tragedies that threads throughout the
history of child welfare in Canada.”
Victoria Strong-Boag, author of Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts
its History of Childhood Disadvantage
I like these quotes. A lot. Hughes is social activist and a now-retired
judge. Strong-Boag is one of the queens of Canadians history – a valiant
researcher and storyteller.
The reason I like these quotes is… it shows it’s not just me. Reporting
on foster care is the shits. Writing Fostering Truth for Tyee Solutions
Society, Tides Canada and the Vancouver Foundation has been a serious
challenge. And, far from that feel-good glow reporters sometimes get after throwing a really sharp knife at The Man, I feel like I’ve been lobbing
water balloons at shadows.
That is to say, a lot more reporting should happen on this file. And, that’s
why I’ve created this document. It would have really helped me, when I
began writing about care.
I consider the series — 25 traditional pieces plus an interactive digital feature — to be like Martin Frobisher’s 1576 expedition to find the
Northwest Passage. Not entirely successful, but a brave attempt that
offers, in hindsight, valuable maps, sources and cautions to those who
report on foster care and its outcomes in the future.
On the one hand, for journalists who want to change the world by reporting on social issues, foster care offers virgin territory. No one else is
touching it. The awards are yours, waiting to be won.
On the other hand, it might just cost you your sanity.
Sincerely,
Pieta Woolley, December 2013
The basics
B.C.’s child protection system, which includes foster care, is administered by the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). It
has a budget of roughly $500 million.
However, foster care and other protective and support services are also
delivered by 22 aboriginal agencies, both on and off reserves. Some of
that funding comes from the province, some from the feds.
The representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, is
73
arms-length from the province (though her office is funded by the province). Her team offers research and advocacy for those in the system,
and now, those who have aged out to 24 years old. Usually, reporters do
a good job of amplifying her reports (but this does not take the place of
a sustained, independent media interest in child welfare.)
• At home with their parent(s), without any provincial involvement
In addition, there are numerous nonprofits serving vulnerable youth,
including those in or aged-out of foster care. They include Aunt Leah’s
Lifeskills Society; the Boys and Girls Club; Covenant House; the Federation of BC Youth in Care Networks and many, many others. (If you’re
looking for an agency, call Kate Hodgson at the Network of Inner City
Support Services. She is all-knowing).
• With a grandparent or other kinship/kin-like caregiver, with MCFD
involvement and with funds from MCFD (this can take several
forms – beware. Call Carol Ross at the Parent Support Services
Society of BC for a good explanation)
There are usually fewer than 10,000 children and youth in care. However, there are also 30,000 open files with child protection services, and
30,000 investigations into abuse and neglect per year. Assuming no
overlap, that 60,000 represents about one in 15 kids in BC each year.
• Homeless or street-involved
Find data here:
The government’s annual performance report has LOADS of great numbers: http://www.mcf.gov.bc.ca/about_us/performance_management.
htm
• At home with their parent(s), with an open file at MCFD
• With a grandparent or other kinship/kin-like caregiver, without
MCFD involvement
• Adopted — by family or a stranger
• In a group home
• On a Youth Agreement (living independently with about $1,100 a
month in help from the province)
• In youth jail (may also be in care)
• In a drug or psychiatric treatment centre (bay also be in care)
• In temporary foster care with strangers
The ministry’s service plan is also a good reference: http://www.bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2012/sp/pdf/ministry/cfd.pdf
• In a foster home that belongs to a grandparent or other kinship /
kin-like caregiver
The ministry offers publications, worth thumbing through (especially
education outcomes): http://www.mcf.gov.bc.ca/foster/publications.
htm?WT.svl=Body
• Under a “continuing care order,” when parents have extinguished
their guardianship, and the province becomes the parent (this represents about half the kids in care)
The Rep’s reports can be found here: http://www.rcybc.ca/Content/Publications/Reports.asp
The list of aboriginal agencies can be found here: http://www.mcf.gov.
bc.ca/about_us/aboriginal/delegated/pdf/agency_list.pdf
BC’s abused and neglected children and teens: where are they?
*** The only kids considered to be “in care” are those in the last three
categories. So you can see that the “in-care” statistic is very precise, and
really doesn’t describe the range or the volume of this population of kids.
A few great sources here are:
Parent Support Services Society of BC: http://www.parentsupportbc.ca/
BC Federation of Foster Parent Associations: http://bcfosterparents.ca/
BC Federation of Aboriginal Foster Parents: http://www.fafp.ca/
74
• Anecdotally, many return to their biological families, and many
land on the street or in prison
(both federations have regional divisions you can contact.)
Data for the 19 to 24-year-old set is scarce.
The Adoptive Families Association of BC: http://www.bcadoption.com/
About 700 foster kids and 400 kids on a Youth Agreement age out each
year. So there’s 5,500 of this group in B.C. between the ages of 19 and 24.
(There is a larger-but-unknown number of young adults who spent time
in foster care when they were younger, or who were raised by grandparents etc, in this age group too.)
Responsive Intersectoral Children’s Health, Education, and Research
(Richer) Initiative: http://www.bcchildrens.ca/Services/SpecializedPediatrics/RICHERInitiative/default.htm
(This is an absolutely invaluable collection of activist-pediatricians,
researchers, foster parents, aboriginal agency reps, and others with immense depth of knowledge. They meet Thursday mornings at Ray Cam
Community Centre)
Ray Cam & Britannia Community Centres
Both centres offer front-lines services, and staff is happy to talk on the
record.
Once these kids reach their 19th birthday, what happens to them?
• Funding for foster care and Youth Agreements ends
• About half go on income assistance within six months of aging out
(welfare or disability)
• They can apply for an Agreement with Young Adults contract,
which helps pay their living expenses when they upgrade school,
etc.
• They can apply for Youth Education Advancement Funding
(YEAF), which covers up to $5,500 post-secondary expenses; they
can also get tuition waved at some B.C. post-secondary institutions
• Those with developmental disabilities transition into the care of
Community Living B.C.
Contact the ministry for info on how many young adults are making use
of their services. Very, very few are in post-secondary at any one time.
This story offers plenty of sprouts that could be built on for other stories
about aging out: http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/04/08/Aging-Out/
The Vancouver Foundation did a poll in 2013 with some useful numbers: http://www.thetyee.ca/Documents/2013/10/09/YHITransitionsSurveyResults-Report_08102013.pdf
The Jim Casey Foundation in the US has wonderful American data and
data showing how certain policy changes can significantly help outcomes: http://jimcaseyyouth.org/
Richer initiative, again: http://www.bcchildrens.ca/Services/SpecializedPediatrics/RICHERInitiative/default.htm
Studies on youth formerly in foster care who have become homeless in
BC have been conducted by many (Google-able) agencies and university
departments, but start with the McCreary Centre Society: http://www.
mcs.bc.ca/street_involved_youth
Dr. Steve Mathias, who works out of St. Paul’s running the Inner City
Youth Mental Health Program, should be more of a media star. He’s got
the goods: http://www.slideshare.net/CHEOSNews/steve-mathias-inner-city-youth
MCFD says a focus of its emerging work is with this aged-out population. I’m not sure what has materialized…
Five things I wish I knew when I was starting this series:
1. Anonymity is crucial for these youth and young adults — they can
get profoundly hurt if they are identified. Even if they offer you their
real name, do not use it. If your editor won’t accept an anonymous
source, you can’t write the story.
2. MCFD watches journos like a hawk. The bureaucrats are very
sensitive to their ministry’s image. Make sure everything is doublefact-checked, and make sure the ministry has the opportunity to
comment on Every. Little. Thing.
3. The story about foster kids is really a story about three things: 1.
Disability; 2. Poverty; 3. First Nations. More than half of kids in care
are First Nations. More than half are disabled (broadly defined).
Nearly all lived in poverty.
4. Like Strong-Boag, I was personally derailed many times by the sto-
ries I heard and the people I met. As a parent of young kids myself,
I should have found more personal support and some better coping
strategies.
5. There isn’t a lot of public appetite for stories about wonky govern-
ment policy. Sadly, that’s a lot of what reporting on this topic is.
How to enliven that? Stories about real kids. My hope is, there will
be a summit between journos and the agencies that serve foster kids
and those who have aged out. This will lead to an agreement about
getting those stories out: anonymously, but genuinely and easily.
Places to watch for current news hooks
Canadian Human Rights Tribunal: Through January 2014
The tribunal is currently hearing from the First Nations Children and
75
Family Caring Society, which has alleged that the federal government is
under-funding child welfare on reserves by 20 per cent-plus. There’s a
lot here. Cindy Blackstock is the ED, and the person who can comment.
http://www.fncaringsociety.com/i-am-witness-tribunalcourt-dates
60s scoop: class action lawsuits: now
Stemming from the mass forced adoptions of Aboriginal kids to nonaboriginal families in the 1960s. There are currently large suits in BC,
Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario: http://sixtiesscoopclaim.
com/similar-actions-in-other-provinces/
Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Wraps up in June 2014
Foster care is a large these among witnesses who are “intergenerational
survivors.” The current high rate of First Nations kids in care is also a
question for reconciliation — as in, when the TRC wraps up, what next
for reconciliation? Historian John Milloy and Sto:lo activist Ernie Crey
are good sources on this: http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=3
The Residential Review — what has been implemented?
This is the latest massive review and report from MCFD. It wrapped up
in 2012. Have any of the recommendations been implemented yet? Is
anyone working on it? Here is a link to the report: http://www.mcf.gov.
bc.ca/pdf/resrevproject_exec_summary.pdf
Death and critical injury reports from the Representative’s office: quarterly
Four times a year, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond releases a report about the
numbers of deaths and critical injuries sustained by children and youth
in care (and receiving services) in that period, and dating back to 2007.
So far, 560 kids have died in or around care. This number needs a lot
of interpretation. Ask MCFD and the Rep’s office for help: http://www.
rcybc.ca/content/Publications/Reports.asp
Vancouver Foundation
The philanthropic agency is conducting ongoing projects aimed at understanding and solving the problems that lead kids in foster care on to
the streets.
http://vancouverfoundation.ca/initiatives/youth-homelessness
Books to get you going:
Breach of trust: My harrowing years as a foster child in the care of the
British Columbia Ministry of Social Services & Housing Gloria May Biron
(1998)
Wasted: The Plight of America’s Unwanted Children Patrick T. Murphy
(2000. My top pick)
Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts its History of Childhood Disadvantage Victoria Strong-Boag (2012)
Stolen from our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and
the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities Suzanne Fournier and Ernie
Crey (1998)
A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School
System John Milloy (1998)
On Their Own: What Happens to Kids When They Age Out of the Foster
Care System Martha Shirk, Gary Stangler (USA 2006)
Childhood Denied: Ending the Nightmare of Childhood Abuse and Neglect
Kathleen Reardon (2008)
Reimaginging Intervention in Young Lives: Work, Social Assistance and
Marginalization Karen Foster and Dale Spencer (2012. Another top
pick)
76
Three final highly-opinionated, take-with-a-grain-ofsalt thoughts
• In the series, I touched on the so-called “knowledge economy’s”
role in marginalizing many youth, but this perspective needs much
more work. One-fifth of B.C. teens don’t graduate high school by
19. They’re shut out of an economy where making a decent living
hinges on not just high school, but very specific post-secondary.
The progressive left likes to trash on the idea that kids should be
educated with a job in mind (education for citizenship!) But those
without skills-based education and without ongoing parental support are in peril.
• Slamming the foster care and child protection system for its imperfections is a bit like disparaging the rescue efforts after the Titanic
sank. Yes, the rescuers should be held accountable, but the misery
and contexts that lead to the system getting involved with a family
is where, I believe, much, much more journalism should be done.
Why do so many B.C. parents abuse and neglect their kids to the
point that the province wades in? What is the ultimate root cause of
the slide into terrible outcomes for these young adults aging out of
care?
• Criminality and the relationship between the justice system and
these kids is something I didn’t write about nearly enough. Over 40
per cent have been charged with a crime by the time they age out.
Lauren Freedman, a very bright and quotable young researcher,
just completed her PhD thesis on foster kids in the criminal justice
system. Contact her at [email protected].

by Pieta Woolley - Tyee Solutions Society

Transcription

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