Invisible children no more
Questions posed at the two-day child welfare roundtable organized by Alberta’s Human Services ministry this week were specific: Who investigates when a child in, or out, of government care dies? What information should be available about those deaths? And should Alberta’s sweeping publication ban on identifying children and families receiving services from the child welfare system — even after their death — be tossed out, or revised?
A bigger question for all Albertans is how do we eliminate the stigma attached to the child welfare system and allow children and families to reclaim their names and stories while they are alive?
Governments offer many support services. They include health-care systems, schools to meet all abilities, programs for seniors and care for people with disabilities.
It’s hard to imagine telling someone who needed treatment to overcome a physical injury or illness not to talk about it publicly. Likewise, people who need help with job retraining or need to turn to employment insurance would never be told today those experiences are so shameful that to speak of them publicly will tarnish you.
But through the process of building up wellmeaning privacy safeguards around children in care, particularly the far-reaching publication ban on identifying children or youth receiving social services, Alberta has subtly, but consistently, delivered the message that there is something wrong with being a part of that system. It reinforces the sense these children are somehow different from their peers who are not in care.
As a trio of young women who’ve been wards of the province said at the roundtable, there is no reason why children in care should be invisible. There are more than 11,000 Alberta children and youth receiving some form of intervention services at any one time.
Privacy should be their choice, not a legal straitjacket.
It is not just children who suffer from this stigma. Parents can also feel shamed and stigmatized if their family needs the help of child welfare services.
Sometimes, abuses committed by parents and step-parents are horrific. If family members act in a criminal manner toward their children, they belong in the justice system where there are wellestablished laws to protect the identity of minors and victims of sexual offences.
But there are some parents who simply need help to improve their parenting skills. Others make bad choices, but with the help of social services can get their lives back on track.
Why would anyone ask a system for help, however, if it is seen to be so shameful that you can’t even talk about your interactions with that system and attach your name to it?
Under the current rigid rules that seem to place secrecy above all else, it is as difficult to celebrate the good in the system as to critique things that should be improved.
Some of the statistics provided by the Human Services department at the roundtable show there are stories worth celebrating. They include 754 family reunifications and 1,422 family preservations between April and September 2013.
That’s more than 2,100 families who made changes in their lives so they could keep their children, or get them back.
What steps did those families take to make that happen? What challenges did they overcome? What help and support did they receive? Their stories could help others.
Right now, they cannot publicly celebrate their successes or publicly advocate for more services for families like their own. They can only be talked about generically.
Just as other causes, from breast cancer to posttraumatic stress disorder, have had individuals step up and champion those issues, with both their stories and their face, lifting the veil of secrecy on the child welfare system will allow the public to understand these families are not so different than their own and worthy of the resources dedicated to the system.