Who’s taking care of our children?
Abused Quebec kids’ horrific tales Bulldog director asks hard questions
Thieves of Innocence (Les voleurs d’enfance) OOO Written and directed by Paul Arcand. 98 minutes. At the Varsity. 14A The children we come to know in Thieves of Innocence — some of them now middle- aged adults — are victims of double jeopardy. First they suffered at the hands of their parents, who variously beat them, molested, raped or neglected them. Then, taken under the wing of Quebec’s Youth Protection agency, they have been further punished, penned up, left in isolation rooms or simply ignored.
Paul Arcand, a Montreal radio host turned investigative journalist, is a bulldog, relentless with a camera and a microphone. As director and writer of Thieves of Innocence, he holds evasive provincial bureaucrats and a sidestepping minister up for scrutiny and contrasts their answers with the reality of young people who wind up on the streets after the system spits them out at age 18.
After coming out of a screening of this film, one might reasonably conclude that the family home can be one of the most hazardous places for a Canadian child to grow up. Many more children die of abuse than die of cancer. Those who are placed in foster care are usually subjected to a system more punishing than the correctional institutes where convicted pedophiles wind up. The average sentence for a convicted pedophile is 18 months while their victims are damaged for life. One of the several cases Arcand follows involves the family in which five children were regularly beaten, humiliated and sexually abused by their father. Two of the brothers and a sister, now in their 30s and 40s, take Arcand to the neighbourhood where they lived and where one of them was once tied to a tree in the backyard with a dog collar around his neck. Neighbours and relatives were invited to come by and “ pet the new dog.” Arcand turns the camera on the uncle who lived next door, capturing the old man’s protests that “ I never knew.” You knew, says the victim, his nephew, “ You came over and petted me.” Arcand is just as canny in some startling footage of a chief bureaucrat skewered by his questions about the rent on a brandnew downtown office tower housing the Youth Protection agency.
At the same time as the agency moved into the building, funding at youth centres was plummeting. Arcand’s camera contrasts a cell in a correction facility where a pedophile lives with all mod cons, including a stereo system, TV and video game equipment, with a view of a bare room in a run- down Youth Centre where one of the pedophile’s victims is housed. A woman minister who handles the youth portfolio is taken on a tour of a youth centre and shown into an isolation room where, according to student testimony, children under the supervision of the state ( in total, some 18,000) are punished by incarceration for days on end. The minister, accompanied by a school principal and Arcand, lasts only one minute and 15 seconds in the cell before she is seen knocking on the door to be let out.
Given the evidence that has come out in a Toronto courtroom about similar slips in Ontario’s Catholic Children’s Aid agency, the Quebec failings seen in Thieves of Innocence may be simply one example of the ways in which Canada cares for its greatest asset: its children. Arcand captures heart- breaking testimony from young adults who get shunted from foster home to foster home ( 24 times in one boy’s case) and then are sent into the world with no means to survive.
Their dismay is summed up by one young man who tells Arcand quite truthfully, “ I have no family.”