Listen to thisOne of the most common mantras one hears in relation to the child welfare system across Canada these days is that “the system is broken”. This phrase usually becomes particularly prominent in the context of children and youth in care, placed in group homes or foster homes, and all the challenges that accompany this. And there definitely are some major challenges: For one thing, young people have died in residential settings at an alarmingly regular rate. Over the past few years, aside from death, we have had buildings burned to the ground, discovered institutional abuses that are quite horrific, and listened to young people who survived their placements tell us stories of forced isolation, inadequate provision of basic needs (including food), weird and unusually cruel punishments, and a complete lack of direction in the care planning. There are countless ways to establish problems; the pipeline from care to prison for especially Black and Indigenous youth is well documented. The service disparities associated with protection cases where children and youth do not come into care, which are almost always related to race, but sometimes additionally to disability, gender identities, and other factors, are also well documented. It really should come as no surprise to anyone that this child welfare system is experienced as broken not only by young people and their families, but even by the social workers working within that system.
It is fair to say that there have been many efforts over the years to improve the child welfare system. If we just look at the past 20 years of attempts in Ontario, we can fondly remember the Child Welfare Commission, whose work reviewed all aspects of the system and was to create an opening for fundamental change. Then came the Residential Review in 2006, which identified all the problems listed above. This was followed by the Child Welfare Transformation in 2008 that was to re-build the system stronger and better. In 2015, we had another Residential Services Review that had very similar conclusions as the one from 2006. Then we had a Blueprint for Change, followed by a process of System Modernization, and finally landing at the current Child Welfare Redesign. One might think that with all this transformative work, the system we are talking about today is no longer the one that was in place 125 years ago when child welfare first started in Canada. But it very much is the same system. Here is why.
The first problem has been the centrality of child welfare leaders in these attempts to change the system. In all the attempts listed above, child welfare leaders were not only consulted, but really were at the centre of the process, informed that process, and to a large extent, controlled the process. One might think that’s a good thing – the idea of centering the expertise of those within the system seems like a good idea. But when we look closer at who those child welfare leaders are, we realize that they are overwhelmingly white people who have worked within child welfare for at least 25 years, sometimes 40 plus years. We should not be surprised that people whose entire professional development has unfolded in a particular system tend to replicate the patterns and dynamics of that system as they try to change it. There has not been a meaningful driving force for changing the system that comes from outside of that system in decades, consultants notwithstanding. The second problem is that virtually all the attempts to change the system have unfolded largely through the discipline of social work. This is especially problematic in two different ways. First, it is a specific element of social work that has been driving the system, one that has firmly rooted itself in system bureaucracy and funding structures and aims to navigate within these. Second, it is an element of social work that is stuck in a Eurocentric approach to social work driven by psychological concepts that have at best awkwardly been transferred to social work. If we look at the same 20 years as we did above, we can quickly and easily identify the movement from attachment theory to resilience theory to trauma theory. These are all important, of course, but they are firmly rooted in very particular ways of understanding human needs and behaviours, and they all privilege interpersonal contexts and individual responsibility over social and systemic contexts and manipulations of power structures.
I am working on a more detailed analysis of these problems and of what I am about to suggest below (look for the book sometime in 2024). But here is a short version of the argument. In my view, the child welfare system in Canada (and very similarly in the US and UK) is not broken at all. If we think that a broken system is the starting point for change, we will never change this system. I would argue that child welfare is an exceptionally well-functioning system that has, for 125 years, accomplished exactly what is has set out to accomplish, or what it was designed to do. To understand this point, we must go back to how and why this system was established in the first place.
Ted Dunlop, a former colleague of mine, has written an excellent history of the emergence of child welfare in Ontario (two articles are available in the Scottish Journal of Residential Care from about 10 years ago). He used local archival research to tell the story. In short, the second half of the 19th century featured a great deal of immigration in Toronto, with people arriving somewhat destitute from Ireland in very large numbers. For various reasons, they were not greeted with enthusiasm by the settlers who were already in Toronto, and this maintained a rather severe class differential between the Irish newcomers and the relatively well-to-do Toronto middle and upper classes. One effect of this was that children, sometimes very young, became very visible on the streets, working as shoe shiners, hustling newspapers, and often becoming unpleasant for the more well-to-do settlers to deal with. Local business owners started complaining about these children and youth, which eventually convinced politicians (all white men at the time) to support existing calls for doing something about the unfortunate circumstances of these children. Originally, child welfare legislation was integrated into existing legislation related to cruelty to animals; the goal was simple: get these children and youth off the streets by any means necessary. The result was a rapid rise of three new institutions: foster care, involving a highly moralistic, Christian group of people seeking to re-educate children and make them respectable white, protestant citizens; youth criminal justice, that labeled child poverty as a crime, and orphanages, that removed children and youth from sight.
The development of child welfare in Ontario, therefore, had absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of children. It was instead an approach to dealing with a social pest, an inconvenience, and an aesthetic problem that allowed for the criminalization of childhood, the moralization of ways of being and living such that a particular way was held up as the right way, and a sanitization of streets through simple removal of unsightly objects (children). Understanding that child welfare was designed in this way and for this reason goes a long way toward understanding the next 100 years of child welfare. It explains the anti-Black racism so deeply embedded in this system, because Black children and youth became the next target of child welfare. The proliferation of Black children on the streets of Toronto and other cities in Ontario resulted in further criminalization, this time specifically of Black childhood, as well as further sanitization, this time in the form of homes for Black children hidden away from mainstream society. It also explains the enormous complicity of child welfare in the Indian Residential School system for the entire 20th century. Residential Schools embodied all three of the institutions designed to meet child welfare goals. They criminalized through harsh punishments, abuse, and isolation; they moralized and imposed white, middle-class identities on Indigenous children, and they sanitized by locating those children in Schools often built in rural areas but always operated to interact minimally or not all with mainstream society. The Sixties Scoop, lasting from about 1959 to 1984, fits very well with this understanding of the design of child welfare. Removing Indigenous children from their families and communities and gifting them as objects to white families is entirely congruent with the goals and ambitions of this system.
The very same foundations explain why, over the past forty years or so, the next groups to be targeted by this system were young people identifying as LGBTQ2S+, young people with disabilities, and young people growing up in poverty. Although at a lesser scale, the targeting of children and families without legal status in Canada also fits this framework well. And geographic differences across Canada all start to make sense within this framework. Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario have followed the founding principles of child welfare by focusing on the abuse of Black and Indigenous communities in particular. On the Western front, Chinese and Japanese communities during the first half of the 20th century, and in more recent years South Asian communities have experienced largely the same disproportionalities and service disparities as Black communities have in the Eastern part of the country. Notably, Indigenous communities have experienced these things across all parts of the country, but generally, the more visible Indigenous communities are across the country, the more obviously they have been incarcerated, isolated, and abused.
What does this mean for child welfare? Well, it means that until we confront the simple reality that we are dealing with a system that was not designed to ensure the welfare of children, we will not change that system from within. In fact, I would argue that constructing a system that centers the welfare of children means abandoning the idea that a designated system, such as child welfare, can actually accomplish that. It turns out that children and youth live within multiple systems that threaten and harm their welfare. They live in education, justice, housing, food security, poverty, homelessness, and health systems that all collude to stream them toward the ultimate intervention – that of the child welfare system, which, true to its original design, aims to provide surveillance and containment of anyone who disrupts the aesthetic of the liberal, individually-driven, largely white culture of social progress. None of this is to suggest that steps taken in recent years to improve child welfare outcomes are undesirable or useless. There has indeed been much tinkering within the system that has improved policies for young people aging out of care, created stronger regulations for placement providers, introduced significant efforts to infuse child welfare social work with training related to equity, diversity and inclusion themes, and much more. There has also been an enormous move to limit institutional care and privilege family-based care, and to find ways of supporting kinship care arrangements for children experiencing challenges in their original homes. All these things are good, but they reflect tinkering within a system that is protecting its fundamental goal to exercise surveillance and containment. This system will not stop its work, and the people running that system will never be able to step outside of the container that has informed their work for decades.
From my perspective, the question is not whether child welfare is broken. The question is whether we want to continue to uphold and support a system that has steadfastly and quite effectively maintained its original purpose. I don’t think so. As I mentioned before, child welfare was originally integrated into the legislation dealing with cruelty against animals. As of right now, I would have more confidence that my dog will have a chance at a good life by placing him in a dog shelter and hoping for the system to ensure his welfare than I have confidence that my child would have a good life by placing them in the care of the child welfare system. How about you?
