Fallon – child welfare and Aboriginal families

So the rate of child protection involvement in Aboriginal families is very high and different than non-Aboriginal children and families.  The First Nations incidence study of reported child abuse and neglect demonstrated that at the point of identification, so when a child or family is identified for a concern to a child welfare authority, First Nations children compared to non-Aboriginal children are identified at a rate of approximately four times.  So you move through a service continuum, so when we look at what the investigating worker decides to do for that child and family as a result of a child protection investigation, we then realize that the rate of place in out of home care becomes twelve-fold,  so First Nations children at the end of an investigation are twelve times more likely to be placed in out of home care. 

The reason why that is, is a complicated one.  The rate of neglect is much higher than non-Aboriginal children and the neglect/maltreatment type is really driving that over-representation of Aboriginal children in child welfare systems or child protection systems.   

We measure neglect in several ways: whether or not there is appropriate supervision for the child; whether or not the physical needs of the child is met; whether the medical needs of the child is met.  And what we find with Aboriginal children and the over-representation in the Canadian child protection system is that often times the finding of substantiated neglect is driven by structural issues, so that there isn’t access to appropriate housing, there isn’t access to appropriate resources so that the child can be fed and clothed properly.  There isn’t access to appropriate interventions for addictions issues.  We’re dealing with often times a generation of parents who have not had parents because their caregiver would be in either a residential school setting or in care of a child welfare authority.  So often times a First Nations person or an Aboriginal person have not had the opportunity to be parented so the difficulty in parenting children is certainly represented in some of those data. 

So the child protection system for Aboriginal people is really a very residual model and really is a response to colonialism, a response to residential schools, a response to unprecedented numbers of Aboriginal children in child protection systems.  And it really speaks to the need to have a different response to children of families who clearly have needs but should not be met with a system that continues to separate children from their families but instead a system that responds to the needs that we have so clearly documented with appropriate interventions, with an understanding of what neglect is and isn’t and with the appropriate culturally sensitive services that Aboriginal children and families need.