Comments from story When Words Fail, Public EyeOnline By Sean Holman.
Another piece of this that many would not know is that internally, there is little ability to build capacity & competency. Internal training is almost non-existent.
Professional development is crucial in this field. Although the training provided upon being hired is extensive, a missing piece is how people are trained to analyze risk in families. And, of course many communities just don’t have the resources and supports to be part of the solution for families.
Many individuals are promoted who lack the actual practice experience to have the clinical skills, knowledge & abilities required. And since the turnover of workers is so high, you have people becoming "senior" workers with a year under their belt and then they in turn begin "training" & "mentoring" other workers. Then they might get promoted to a supervisory role after a couple of years. This goes for managers too, many of whom haven't even actually worked in child protection, ever.
De-skilling the workforce is also a key piece of the ideology and in child protection, as this latest report suggests, this is lethal for some children & youth. It isn’t the fault of the workers, there are many secret decisions made and then workers have to carry them out. It happens all the time. If something doesn’t make sense on a file, ask who made the actual decision. Many people, internally and externally have been "speaking truth to power" since 2001 when the writing was on the wall and people could analyze that we would be arriving at the place we are today.
And it is an HR illusion & spin about staffing. The attrition & medical leave rates are so high and the initial staffing cuts so deep that they can't even hope to play catch up. And believe me, across the country the word is out that BC is NOT the place to work in child protection.
To bring this into clarity, there are two particular cases that help connect the dots.
One relates to Mr. Allan Dwayne Schoenborn, the man accused of killing his three children in Merritt, BC.
Nothing is yet known about his childhood, but dollars to donuts he was a victim/survivor of the child welfare system of the 80’s, the one that the BC Liberals brought back. This is a man who has a long history of mental illness and substance misuse/abuse, who has quite likely been failed by every system he has ever come into contact with – mental health, criminal justice, probation, education, child welfare, and health. Was he in care, it is quite likely he was, or perhaps should have been at some point as a child. One may also speculate as to whether his partner, Ms. Darcie Clarke might also have had her own history with the child welfare system as a child. There are reasons people choose each other and end up in these kind of relationships, where even more devastating things happen, such as in this case.
Another case is Luke Aday, on trial in Victoria for the random murder of a stranger, James Allanach. Court testimony has heard at length about the neglect and abuse he suffered as a child and his complex psychiatric conditions. These do not just develop on their own, this kind of damage starts in childhood and society pays the cost, as did the poor victim and his family and friends.
Psychiatrist: Accused not a psychopath: Defendant suffered from a 'cluster' of personality disorders, court told
These kind of tragedies don’t just happen for no reason. They aren’t random acts. If you neglect a wound and don’t give it the care, attention & first aid it needs, it becomes infected, sometimes gangrene sets in and you lose something valuable. Abuse, deprivation and neglect in childhood beget marginalization, mental illness, sometimes violence and devastation when people become adults. Then the cycle is repeated as these childhood victims/survivors become parents themselves. With support, timely and meaningful intervention from skilled, knowledgeable and caring professionals, including child protection social workers, therapists, family support workers, addiction counsellours, probation officers and many others tragedies can be averted. It is whether the system, the government itself, places a high importance on this.
From where we sit, we see the BC government pouring millions into the 10 day party that is the Olympics, multi-million dollar cost overruns on convention centres and other projects that will take decades for BC taxpayers to pay off. However, around the province, children are abused, neglected and BC leads the country in child poverty for the 4th year running. As the Representative’s latest report, Amanda, Savanah, Rowen & Serena: From Loss to Learning highlights, children are dying around the province. Those tragedies occur as a direct result of the BC Liberal government, no-one else is responsible for those public policy decisions, well except for the Canadian government.
As we head into another summer, where caseloads will sit in crisis and uncovered, it’s not too late to start the planning for improvements in child protection. The decision rests solely with the government. Here are the top 10 things the BC government could do right now to prevent even more tragedies from occurring to citizens of BC:
1. Simplify and clarify specific priorities and tasks – Ie. child protection activities over paperwork;
2. Decrease administrative burden & duplication of paperwork for social workers;
3. Hire additional social work assistants around the province for each office;
4. Re-deploy child protection trained senior workers & supervisors from specialty positions (family development response & family group conferencing, policy analysts and other “special projects”) into the field to lower caseloads and add practice experience to teams;
5. Hire retired social workers for part-time and short-term contracts;
6. Expand hiring of individuals with diverse bachelor & masters degrees and experience in the social services, train and have senior workers mentor them;
7. Create mentoring roles for senior staff for new workers;
8. Increase the work and utility of community services managers;
9. Put short-term funding into community support agencies to boost family support workers who work with families in their homes;
10. Halt all plans for continuing the devolution of services (Aboriginal child protection) for at least 2 years and provide additional funding to Community Living BC and Aboriginal agencies who are already performing child protection duties so they can begin providing more services to those in need.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Child Welfare in BC: The Stuff Nightmares are Made of
Make no mistake, there isn’t a time in this province over the last 7 years that MCFD has not struggled and failed to meet the needs of some of the most vulnerable, whether that is in the North, or in any region around BC. These cases aren’t anomalies. Read the BC Coroner's Service Statistics. Unfortunately you won't read any BCCS recommendations for MCFD in their last report, as the secrets are safe there, with a former MCFD insider well placed to keep a lid on things in BCCS. These children have LOST their lives, their families have been devastated and torn apart, because of the public policies and purposeful actions of the BC Liberal government from the time they came into office in 2001. It has been and continues to be non-stop chaos, designed and implemented by people who often have not actually worked in child protection, nor working in child welfare in BC and have even a passing familiarity of the issues and terrain. This is part of the neo-conservative ideology of the BC Liberals. This is what it has looks like:
- Funding cuts, downsizing & increase of workload for remaining workers,
- Deregulation, increase of administrative burdens and toxic work environment,
- Decentralize major tasks, oversight & accountability,
- Alternative Service Delivery (ASD) – devolve services from direct government from Community Living BC & now Aboriginal Services (April 1st 2008 all Aboriginal child protection in Vancouver is now the responsibility of Vancouver Aboriginal Child & Family Services Society).
The big problem is, organizations and people like KAP and many others have been trying to tell the government that this kind of governance ideology won’t work in child protection, THE COSTS ARE JUST TOO HIGH and the VICTIMS who really bear that cost are no longer with us because of a profound systemic failure, a self-serving and destructive force called the BC government, which is supposed to protect them. What has worked is being able to place things behind closed doors, no government responsibility, no accountability, arms length and the BC government doesn’t have to be responsible for a whole lot of children dying around the province. They’ve gotten away with this for 7 years.
Ask MCFD to release the statistics on the attrition rate of social workers. On the numbers of social workers who’ve resigned, gone on medical leaves, how about suicides of social workers? These are all closely guarded and anyone who does ask is likely put on a hit list and referred to the Minister’s office.
Or they are silenced and savaged until they shut up and leave so they can continue to live themselves. Workers are just literally being ripped apart working in this toxic and dysfunctional organization in every region in the province. Many young, new workers (majority women) are quitting in droves, completely burnt out by the time they reach their mid-20’s, after one, or two years on the job. But does the organization do anything to improve the working conditions? Absolutely not. Ask yourself, would you want to send your daughter, fresh out of university, into a home where someone is mentally ill/a drug addict/has criminal convictions/is involved in crime and discuss how they’re caring for their children, whether they should keep them? How about with no cell phone, by herself? It happens every day in this province and MCFD gets away with it.
Ask MCFD the amount of your taxpayer dollars that have gone into paying Worksafe BC fines for breaching legal duties and responsibilities for occupational safety & health (OSH)? They’ve been fined thousands of dollars. They have money for lots of executive and management retreats and lunches, failed experiments, but none for workers, or cell phones.
Right now, how many child death reviews are happening in MCFD? Do they even have the numbers? How many involve children & youth involved with CLBC? Do they have the numbers? Do the authorities know that each regional director makes the decision on whether a review even takes place, or not? And as those who’ve written reports know, those final reports are edited & re-written by MCFD personnel before they are released.
I think it is time that the United Nations became involved in the conduct of the BC government over this Ministry in its’ systemic negligence towards children in need of protection. MCFD Deputy Minister Lesley Du Toit, has been affiliated with the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD) for a long time. How does this all connect for her? She knows Canada is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and has a strong background in child welfare. She more than anyone in BC knows the worst of what is happening, except for Marilyn Hedlund, the MCFD provincial director of Child Protection. And a note to all of you, after Ms. Hedlund’s left the leadership of the child welfare system in Saskatchewan, it required and received a huge cash infusion, which only usually happens when there are a slough of child deaths, or there are BIG lawsuits.
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Hard-hitting report on the deaths of four children in northern BC released
Vancouver/CKNW(AM980). April 16th 2008.
BC’s independent child and youth representative has released a hard-hitting report on the deaths of four children in northern BC in the past decade. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond says BC’s child protection system failed the children on numerous levels. Turpel-Lafond reviewed the deaths of 3-year-old Savannah Hall, 4-year-old Amanda Simpson, 7-month-old Serena Wiebe and 14-month-old Rowen Von Neiderhausern. Three of the children were aboriginal, one was in foster care - all had some contact with the system. The report identifies key deficiencies such as failure to recognize child abuse, inadequate child protection investigations, and information sharing...it talks about ineffective training of social workers, staffing shortages, and high caseloads. Turpel-Lafond makes 11 recommendations, saying current practices have shown no improvement since these children died.
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Government failing children at risk
Lindsay Kines, Times Colonist. Published: Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Excerpt:
The child welfare system failed four children who died in northern B.C. from 1999 to 2005, and the provincial government has yet to learn from its mistakes, a hard-hitting report from the independent children's watchdog says.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond said her investigation of the deaths found recurring problems including sub-standard safety assessments, staff shortages and poor communication between the Ministry of Children and Family Development and other professionals.
"Most significantly, the investigation found an inability on the part of the ministry to learn from valuable lessons," she told a press conference. "Even internal ministry reviews of these deaths provided lessons that were not returned to the front-lines of the system - including not returned to this day."
Turpel-Lafond said the "standard of practice has not appreciably improved" since the time of the children's deaths.
The report examined the lives and deaths of Amanda Simpson, Savannnah Hall, Rowen Von Niederhausern and Serena Wiebe. Each child had a history of family involvement with the child welfare system.
Turpel-Lafond said the deaths occurred at time when the ministry's northern region was struggling to provide service, while trying to recruit, train and retain staff.
"At the time of each of these deaths, major policy changes were underway on top of this shifting foundation of high staff turnover, staff shortages, and resource limitations," she said.
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