Words Don't Fail: Governments Do

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.