Don’t look away from these children. They deserve more
Look at their faces. Look, and don’t look away. The great postwar Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, in his essay, The Face of the Other, argued that when we truly look at the face of another human being, we discover not only that person’s humanity, but our own.
For a decade now, children who died in Alberta’s foster care system, or while receiving child protection services, were robbed of their faces and names. It was against the law to identify them or their parents. It was against the law for their parents to speak publicly about their lost children, to start a memorial Facebook page. Where children had been murdered by people close to them, or died due to the negligence of their caregivers, it was illegal to name those responsible, if doing so might identify the child.
The unconstitutional ban didn’t just rob the dead of their full humanity. It didn’t just rob families of the right to mourn or fight for justice.
It allowed the government to escape questions about whether and how the child welfare system failed.
It denied us all the chance to face up to our fundamental human responsibility to our most vulnerable.
Look at their faces. They indict us all. As citizens of this most fortunate province, did we do everything we could to save these children, or to learn from their young lives and deaths?
On Wednesday, the government formally lifted the publication ban on the identities of children who died after coming to the attention of child welfare. The new law is imperfect. It still allows the government, or third parties such as foster agencies or First Nations to seek ex parte publication bans from a judge, without notice to the press or family. It denies families any right to challenge such bans. And today, we can still only publish a few pictures. After years of suppressing the truth, the government finally admitted 741 child welfare clients died between 1999 and 2013 — not the 56 they’d reported to the legislature.
But a five-year Edmonton Journal/Calgary Herald investigation has only been able to identify 10 per cent of the dead. The province has never released the other names.
Look into their faces. Read their names. And wonder about the other 700 faces we can’t yet find. Then ask yourself what response their faces, their fates, demands of you.