Question of the week: To be answered in 250 words.
• Question of the week: How can a child protection service-delivery system that includes a community approach address policies that sustain rather than end poverty?
• What are the major themes that stood out in the lecture, readings and video clips?
•
• Do any of these themes have any relevance to your personal and professional learning and aspirations as a social worker? If yes and/or no, identify why and how.
Ensure to review the lecture, readings/Articles and the following video clips to answer the questions below.
1) Video
http://www.cbc.ca/8thfire/2011/12/pamela-palmater.html
2) Video
http://www.mun.ca/socwrk/home/community.php
3) Video
http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Canada/Manitoba/ID/2665748124/
4) Video
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rSmn7X2-Glw%3Frel%3D0%26wmode%3Dtransparent
Required Readings/Articles
Gillespie,J., Whitford,D., Abel, M., (2010). Community networking: A policy approach to enhance Aboriginal child welfare in off-reserve Communities. Indigenous Policy Journal, Vol. 21 (3). (Uploaded in file)
Wharf, B. (2002). Introduction. In B. Wharf (ed.), Community approaches to child welfare. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, Ltd. (Uploaded in file)
Lecture for the week:
Community Approaches to Child Welfare
If child protection, as it is presently conceptualized and delivered has major problems in its purpose and effectiveness and in its compatibility with anti-oppressive practice, are there alternative approaches that achieve the objective of supporting families while protecting children? Building community resources for children and families so as to concentrate policy upon supporting parents has been presented as an alternative approach to both policy and practice. These approaches have at their foundation a belief that supporting families in a community context inevitably leads to better outcomes and more safety for children. This unit explores the strengths and weaknesses of focusing on community capacity.
Brian Wharf’s “Community Capacity and Child Welfare” provides a comprehensive overview of the role of community capacity building in child welfare policy, relating it to other strategies that have been discussed in the course so far. Wharf and others make a strong case for community capacity building as a major child welfare policy strategy. However, some limits of the approach have to be recognized. Wharf himself recognizes some of them:
• Community capacity building is not an alternative to reducing child and family
poverty strategies or tackling other systemic inequities. Both are needed.
• Community approaches can only succeed if they receive adequate and stable
funding.
• The success of community policy approaches depends on anti-racist and anti-
oppressive approaches in child welfare practice.
• Community capacity building cannot completely replace the need for child
protection though it is likely to reduce the need for it.
• Building community capacity is likely to involve choosing which agencies and
which types of community capacity building will receive financial and political
support.
How these choices are made can undermine the implementation of the strategy.
Some community work approaches operate as alternatives or supplement existing child welfare services by building the capacity of communities to provide healthier environments for families and children. Neighborhood Houses are an example of this approach though they are often inadequate to reverse the devastating consequences of neighborhood disadvantage. Child protection involvement in the lives of certain children and their families is heavily concentrated on those on the margins. Poverty and other structural inequities mean that these families are often clustered together. The intense and often coercive state surveillance and supervision under which many of these families live is antithetical to building community capacity.
Community approaches to child protection can therefore be seen as especially important for Indigenous peoples as they hold the potential to redress this situation. Community approaches are also more consistent with Indigenous values and beliefs about family and community and because Indigenous community control of child welfare is a necessary step in severing the colonial bond. Policy responses to Indigenous initiatives to repatriate child welfare to Indigenous communities take different forms in different jurisdictions.
Some examples:
• In Manitoba, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry Report (1991) eventually led to a restructuring of family and child welfare services in 2000 that recognized the authority and responsibility of Métis and First Nations to care for their children. In 2003, under The Child and Family Services Authority Act, Manitoba established five new child welfare ‘authorities’, four of which are Indigenous (Northern Authority, Southern Authority, Métis and All Nations Response Unit) . The most appropriate authority for clients is determined by applying the following values: children, families and communities belong together; decisions will be in the best interests of children; and service arrangements should be culturally appropriate, stable and timely. However, clients have self-determination and can elect the authority from which they wish to receive serve.
• In British Columbia, Indigenous control of child welfare has evolved in a more ad hoc manner, perhaps because BC First Nations (in contrast to First Nations in other jurisdictions) never signed treaties. In 1980 the Spallumcheen people passed a band child welfare by-law that authorized the band to conduct its own child welfare – though the by-law was recognized by the provincial child welfare ministry only after a sit-in protest. In other parts of BC, negotiation of agreements continues. In a number of Indigenous communities there are fully or partially delegated child protection services, though these are still legally required to deliver child welfare services in line with the BC Child, Family and Community Services Act. Non-Indigenous services providers sometimes fail to follow the Act’s stipulation that an Indigenous child’s cultural identity must be recognized and that a child’s community must be notified if a child is to be removed.
• The Ontario Child and Family Services Act (s1 (2)-(5)), while recognizing that Indigenous people should be entitled to provide, wherever possible, their own child and family services in a culturally appropriate manner, still requires that Indigenous agencies adhere to provincial child welfare legislation. The Ontario government has entered into agreements with some communities, which then appoint agencies with fully or partially delegated powers under the Act. There are a number of designated Indigenous agencies in Ontario, for example Tikinagan, Payukotayano, Weechi-it-te-win, Abinoojii Family Services and Dilico. These agencies are required to consult regularly with their band or Indigenous communities about matters affecting children, including placemen, provision of family support services and preparation of care plans, amongst other matters.
• In Nova Scotia, under the Children and Family Services Act (CFSA) Mi’knaw Family and Children’s Service is mandated to provide a range of child protection services to all Indigenous people living in Indigenous communities throughout Nova Scotia. The Mi’knaw agency was also established through a tripartite agreement between the federal government, the provincial Department of Community Services and Indigenous communities represented by the thirteen chiefs of the Nova Scotia bands. The agency also provides support and consultation advice with respect to Indigenous people not living in Indigenous communities. The CFSA requires that the Mi’knaw agency be notified like other parties to proceedings where the child who is the subject of the proceedings is Indigenous and must be involved with the voluntary placement or adoption of Indigenous children (s68 (11-12).
• In the Yukon Indigenous people make up approximately 20 per cent of the population. Although the Yukon Children’s Act was modified in 1984 to allow delegated child welfare authorities run by Indigenous communities, to date only one agreement exists, with the Champagne/Aishihik band. Although more than half of the Yukon’s fifteen First Nations have self-government agreements that enable them to pass their own child welfare laws, none had done so as of this writing (2009). The Yukon Act is currently being revised after a lengthy consultation process. While it does not include provisions for Indigenous control of Indigenous child welfare, it does include requirements for Indigenous involvement in planning, service delivery and court proceedings.
• The Child and Family Service Act Saskatchewan enabled the provincial government to enter into agreements for the provision of children’s services including child protection to First Nations families living on reserves (s 61(6)). Many agencies are now established throughout Saskatchewan. In some cases these agencies also provide service when an Indigenous child lives off reserve (s25, (37)). The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations and the Provincial and the federal government are currently engaged in self-government discussions, with child welfare one of the topics under consideration.
• The Northwest Territories and Nunavat both have legislation that allows for extensive delegation of authority and responsibility for child welfare to Indigenous people under community agreements. Some agreements now exist in these jurisdictions.
Dorothy Roberts is an American scholar who has written extensively about racial disproportionally, specifically, the over-representation of African-American children and families in US child welfare. She makes two suggestions relevant to community approaches (2005). One is that we must understand that child welfare has a negative community-level impact in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The second is that we must never lose awareness that child welfare is a political institution that has a political purpose when it focuses our attention on individual families as the source of child maltreatment rather than the accepted systemic ways that the state maltreats some families. In the Canadian context, Leeuw et al. (2009) make similar points:
We insist on understanding unhealthy families and communities as socially and historically determined and demonstrate that the very same ideas and impulses that informed the residential schooling project, a project that is now understood to have caused widespread cultural trauma and to have exacerbated the ‘problems’ it aimed to remediate, continue to inform child welfare practices in Canada. Without accounting for these continuities and for the larger context within which addictions and mental health issues arise, government efforts to ‘help’ Indigenous peoples today will not only fail, they will worsen the health and well-being of Indigenous children, families, and communities.
Can we, and should we, broaden the “official” definition of child maltreatment to recognize and include the harm done to children and their families by political, social and economic inequities? Perhaps a changed definition is necessary to have an informed basis on which to build community approaches to family and child welfare. As Jack (2004: 378) states, “The research evidence is unequivocal on this matter—significant (structural) inequalities in the distribution of income, housing, employment and access to good- quality services pose a serious threat to the health and well-being of children”. It is out of these disadvantaged circumstances that most child maltreatment – abuse and neglect – arises.
On February 27, 2007, the Assembly of First Nations [AFN], a political organization that represents all First Nations in Canada, and the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada [FNCFCS], a national non-profit organization providing services to First Nations child welfare organizations, took a historic step to attempt to hold Canada accountable before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for its current treatment of Indigenous children. Their complaint alleges that the federal government has a longstanding pattern of providing less government funding for child welfare services to Indigenous children on reserves than is provided to non-Indigenous children. The AFN and FNCFCS are presenting a case to a tribunal ordered by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in support of their allegation of systemic discrimination against Indigenous children and then the federal government will respond. The Tribunal will then decide if discrimination happened or not. If it did happen, then the Tribunal can order a remedy to the discrimination.
If the conundrum of child maltreatment is ever going to be substantively addressed, perhaps other communities of interest (poor people, refugee communities, disabled parents) can follow the lead of AFN and FNCFCS and challenge the systemic nature of the inequities they face. Perhaps it is time to move beyond current widespread comfort with laying the blame for child maltreatment at the doors of individual poor and otherwise marginalized parents, focusing on their individual dysfunction and requiring that they not only manage the conditions of their marginality but that they effectively hide from the mainstream, the effects of this marginality (persistent poverty, inadequate nutrition, substandard housing, dangerous neighborhoods) or risk having their children taken. Child maltreatment can and does occur across all income levels, genders, races and abilities and we must remain cognizant of that fact. At the same time, failing to tackle the structural inequities that create conditions for maltreatment means that racial, ability and class disproportionally in child welfare will continue unabated – and is likely to worsen.
Do community approaches to child welfare have the potential to address these inequities while supporting families and protecting children?
References
Jack, G. (2004). Child protection at the community Level. Child Abuse Review 13, 368–383.
de Leeuw, S., Greenwood, M. & Cameron, E. (2009). Deviant constructions: How governments preserve colonial narratives of addictions and poor mental health to intervene into the lives of indigenous children and families in Canada. International.
Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. DOI 10.1007/s11469-009-9225-1
Roberts, D. (2005). The community dimension of state child protection. Hofstra Law Review 34, 23-37.
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