Listen to thisIn Ontario, Canada, a very sad child welfare case is making headlines as I write this. Just over a year ago, the remains of a young girl were found in a dumpster in a very wealthy neighbourhood of Toronto. No one knew who this girl was, and it took 14 months to identify her using DNA techniques. Recently, the story broke that the young girl was one of five children of a mother who had struggled significantly with the upbringing of her children, such that all the children were, at one point or another, in the care of three different child protection agencies. Despite significant protection concerns surrounding the mother, including addictions, precarious housing, poverty, chronic neglect, parenting capacity and others, at some point during the evolution of this case, the child protection agency that had care of the young girl (and another of the five children) decided to send the children home to mother and close the case. Not long after, the young girl disappeared, and no one knew where she was. For months, attempts to ask the mother of the girl’s whereabout failed, and there was no movement on this case until the remains from the dumpster were identified as this girl. When asked about the disappearance of the young girl more recently, the mother stated that she had met a couple at a coffee shop who claimed to be owners of an organization that provides care for children just like her daughter. The mother could only identify this couple by their first names, had no further information about the supposed services they were offering, but nevertheless decided to hand over her daughter to the couple the very next day. After that, the young girl was never seen again until the remains were found in the dumpster. The mother never went to the police or reported the disappearance of her daughter.
This is only a very brief description of the case; I have left out many details in the interest of brevity. Nevertheless, this describes the version of the case that is circulating in the media. Of note is that although it has been referenced in media stories, little attention has been paid to several other pertinent facts, including that the young girl and at least three of her siblings have significant disabilities and are neurodiverse, that the mother is a Black migrant from the Caribbean, that the child welfare system’s response involved three different agencies in three different regions of the province, and that at least three of the five pregnancies experienced by the mother were invisible pregnancies in the sense that the mother did not engage with the health care system in any way; in fact, two of the children were born at home without any formal medical support of any kind.
Since this story broke, the response has featured two core elements. The first is outrage about the child protection system, and specifically about the child protection agency’s decision to return the children to the mother’s care and close the case. How could this possibly have happened, people (by which I mean well known child welfare advocates with long professional histories in child welfare systems) ask. There must be an inquest immediately to find out what mistakes were made and to correct the system so as to avoid this scenario in the future. The second response is the one that spurs me to write this article; the mother, people (by which I mean both the professionals and the general public) say, is clearly incompetent and unfit to parent, and almost certainly is responsible for the death of the child. She probably sold the child for drugs, or maybe even murdered the child herself. In fact, the level of hate directed at the mother is quite disturbing, and ironically, large numbers of professionals and members of the public are irate that these children were not taken into care at birth, the relationship with mother severed, and that the mother has not yet been criminally charged for something (ranging from child abuse to murder). I call this ironic because most of the time, those same professionals and much of the public argue that every child should grow up in their family and their community and that we should not criminalize the social and economic disadvantages of individual parents, certainly not when there are issues of oppressed identities and social positions in addition to parenting activities.
I find the narrative surrounding this case to be highly problematic. On the one hand, I recognize that a child has died, and we are all upset about that. Our systems have once again failed to protect that child leading to the worst-case scenario. Fair enough; I understand there is good reason to be upset. On the other hand, this is a narrative that invites a blame culture. Let’s look at the failures of one particular organization (in this case, a Children’s Aid Society) and the horrific decision-making of one particular person (in this case, the mother). I fail to see how gathering the evidence of such failures and mistakes can improve the welfare of children. More likely, it will set in motion years of legal process, inquest recommendations, and limited implementation strategies for those recommendations that ultimately will fizzle out before anything will have changed. New priorities will emerge, other terrible cases will come to light, and in the end, no one will feel that anything is better. This is a narrative taken straight from a neo-colonial playbook: ignore the roots of the story, marginalize any discussions of racism and oppression, focus on technocratic process and its shortcomings, and then impose some quick fixes that perpetuate the structures and systems as they are, so they don’t interfere with dominant discourses of social relations and their economic implications. At a higher level, this narrative reinforces the ultimate colonial truth: if we had placed these children in the overwhelmingly white, Christian foster care system, where Eurocentric values and ways of doing things prevail, none of this would have happened, and wonderful, caring middle class families would have ensured the children’s upbringing includes the full course of evidence-based treatments, medications, and training programs available to achieve conformity to neurotypical norms and functioning in existing institutions such as Schools.
This is not a useful way forward. In fact, it is a useful way of protecting what we have and virtually assures the slow emergence of the next case of this nature down the road. If we keep doing the same things, we probably should not expect a different outcome. I think this child died a long time ago, not by the mistakes of an imperfect mother (three cheers for all the perfect mothers) or the decision-making of an agency overwhelmed with trying to navigate conflicting discourses of not taking (especially racialized) children into care and at the same time, intervening decisively to protect children from the harms imposed by their birth families. The narrative for this story has roots in colonization, slavery, the criminalization of Blackness post-abolition, and the ongoing systemic racism embedded across virtually all institutional systems in North America (and likely elsewhere). But even if we want to avoid re-opening those much larger issues and ongoing histories, at the very least we ought to start this story with migration and its consequences. And then talk about what it means to be a single, female, Black migrant to a country and a city that offers such migrants no housing, no economic opportunity, and no social connection. Let’s talk about what services were put in place, what assistance was offered to the mother when she was a child, or a young adult, alone and isolated. Let’s talk about how the mental health system somehow had nothing to offer to this young woman. Let’s talk about what happened when drugs came into play, what doors opened to offer support for either abstaining from drug use or reducing harm. Let’s talk about how this mother was invited into or excluded from a health care system that does have capacity to ensure positive beginnings for newborns. Let’s talk about precarious housing and what that means. And then let’s talk about what it takes to avail oneself of meaningful services for children with disabilities or children who are neurodiverse – we all know that such services exist, but advocating to access such services requires particular social positionings. In short, let’s talk about how it is possible for this woman to arrive in our communities and remain invisible. Is that her fault? Or is there something embedded in the social relations of our communities that keep the doors shut and locked for a woman like her?
I am not suggesting that changing the narrative absolves people facing multiple adversities from responsibility to care for their children. To the contrary, I think it is itself oppressive to deny people facing adversities the capacity to do well, to care for children, and to care for themselves. But clearly, there is no match between what we sometimes call the ‘best interests of the child’ and the ignoring of the child’s parent, rendering her invisible and offering her nothing. And yet, our child welfare systems here in Canada, and based on my experience in many other jurisdictions, are designed to generate this kind of scenario. They are designed to take community and community care out of the equation altogether and instead individualize responsibility for care, either to an individual parent or to an individual organization.
I wonder what would have happened if we had joined this mother in her life course. What would have happened if we had recognized her early, opened some doors, went to visit her and problem-solve practical issues like housing, jobs, education, and others. What if we had celebrated her first pregnancy and created a community around her to care for her as a new mother and the child as a new member of our community? Surely that might have generated an entirely different set of social relations than treating her pregnancy as suspicious, problematic, and potentially harmful. What if had drawn on some professions and communities other than child protection, such as midwifery, settlement workers, and Elders (or peers) from the appropriate Black community?
Relying on our child protection system has consequences. It assures that mothers (and fathers) facing multiple adversities, including public systems still very much embedded in racist attitudes and practices, are either excluded as a valuable resource in the upbringing of their children, or are expected to perform impossible tasks and then blamed when they fail. It ensures that the knowledge systems imposed on the upbringing of children remains colonial in character. And it ensures that where things go wrong, the responses will be technocratic rather than transformative. And yet, everything needed to move toward a much more community-based approach, one that offers co-design of life and approaches to the upbringing of children, already exists. In fact, across many geographic and cultural jurisdictions around the world, this is the norm. Afrocentric and Indigenous ways of knowing and doing have always centered community and the collectivity of family life as a much larger network of social relations than nuclear families. And yet, despite having access to all of this, we continue to respond to every tragedy as if this was the first one we encountered. It was not. And it won’t be the last one if we continue to blame the mother and the children’s aid society for their mistakes, shortcomings, or imperfections.
