A chance to heal

Will we remember the lost victims of childhood trauma past, trauma that lies at the feet of the province?

Atonement. Apology. Amends. These were the least that Nova Scotia owed to children the province handed over to sexual predators and other abusive “caregivers.”

This tragic story isn’t in the deep dark past. Caesar Lalo, the worst of a very sick lot, was a provincial employee and juvenile probation officer until 1990. He was convicted of sexually abusing 29 boys but his young victims numbered far more.

A former senior official at Community Services, the department then, as now, charged with protecting vulnerable kids worried at the time about the trial, intimating that Lalo’s perversion was, at least suspected in the department.

Why dredge up these quartercentury-old grotesqueries? They were the misdeeds of those long gone.

The province’s plan to combat the ravages of opioids, unveiled last week, rekindled dormant anger when it acknowledged the inescapable fact that childhood trauma is a factor leading to drug use and addiction.

And when you travel in certain circles you come to know men and women trying to piece together lives shattered by abuse. Often it happened in the “care” of public officialdom.

After the crimes became known, generally as a result of criminal investigations, subsequent governments stepped up, ostensibly to make it right.

This was the time for atonement, apology and amends.

The duty to “make it right” fell to the Justice Department, which is in fact the department of lawyers. Lawyers’ job is to minimize the exposure and liability of their client, and that’s what they did.

An out-of-court process was designed to minimize additional trauma to victims, they said. The process kept the systemic abuse shadowed from the public spotlight. It also eased and hastened deal-making between the victims’ and the government’s lawyers.

It worked out pretty well, except for those who suffered the abuse. Offers to victims’ lawyers, who collected handsome fees, were accepted and the balance passed on to deeply-damaged clients.

The abused were quick to take a little easy money and run – too often to the nearest liquor store or friendly neighbourhood coke or smack dealer. Others were too defeated, untreated and traumatized to dispute a payout of a few thousand dollars for what was and remains a lifetime of anguish.

Did the province knowingly take advantage of these victims of its own negligence? The adjective — knowingly — is all that remains unanswered.

This is history and the response that will come from some is predictable. Weren’t these bad kids, the “authors of their own misfortune?” Not that long ago, that phrase evoked in Nova Scotians evidence of the subjugation of the powerless by the powerful.

Applied here, it is as abhorrent as it was when said of Donald Marshall, Jr., imprisoned for a crime he did not commit.

The victims of abuse were children. When compensation was offered, they were badly damaged young adults. Their “authorship,” if any, was a minor offence. The “misfortune” was lasting torment.

Where does this leave us? In a province where mental health treatment is rationed and where treatment for substance abuse and addiction is at the end of a very long line. The victims of these past crimes deserve better.

The present government appropriately provided compensation to the victims of abuse at the Nova Scotian Home for Colored Children. At the same time, it declined to revisit the plight of victims of abuse at its institutions or under the care and professed protection of the provincial legal system.

Maybe the government’s right, and it’s too late and too complicated to go back. Some of the victims, with a fortitude that’s impossible for most of us to imagine, have healed and have no need or desire to go back. Others could not survive the journey. Others still demand justice.

The plan to fight opioid abuse and addiction promises improvements in treatment and other interventions. If the province can lift that promise, heard before, off paper, while too late for some, it is still ahead of the worst of a looming epidemic.

At the same time will we remember the lost victims of childhood trauma past? Trauma that lies at the feet of the province, there for all who dare look.

Former Nova Scotian public servants committed crimes, others looked the other way and still others put expedience ahead of real justice.

Today, their successors can, at least, offer a chance for healing.