Put Inuit culture back into child protection: report

A new report called Inuit Child Welfare and Family Support says that services for Inuit children and their families are lagging behind the needs of the country’s Inuit regions. The report, prepared by Ottawa-based Inuit Tuttarvingat, found that there are not enough culturally-relevant services for Inuit families and that has resulted in too many children being put into child protection. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

Child welfare services for Inuit children and their families are lagging behind the needs of the regions, says a new report prepared by Inuit Tuttarvingat.

The report, Inuit Child Welfare and Family Support, gathered the views of health and social service workers from across the country’s Inuit regions as well as from Ottawa’s Inuit community.

Together, they found a number of holes in the system, which they say has resulted in too many Inuit children being put into child protection.

And one of the biggest holes is a gap between Inuit cultural values and local service agencies.

“It’s quite a challenge,” said Mary Ashoona Bergin, a community liaison worker with Inuit Tuttarvingat. “There aren’t very many culturally-relevant programs for these families who are affected. We have to find ways to implement [those kinds of programs] even before children are removed from the home.”

Intervention and prevention programs will help reduce that number, Ashoona Bergin said, along with cultural training for child welfare workers who come from outside the region.

“By discussing this with everyone, it will open doors in other regions,” she said.

The report acknowledges that many of the issues driving children into foster care are linked to poverty, poor housing and substance abuse.

“It’s a bit daunting when you look at the big picture,” said Inuit Tuttarvingat’s director, Diane Kinnon. “But there’s an immediate payoff to invest in prevention.”

And that means educating the frontline workers like teachers and social workers on how to identity children’s problems early on in the process.

“It shouldn’t have to get to the point that children are taken out of the home,” Kinnon said. “We should be able to prevent that in 95 per cent of the cases.”

But in the cases where children must be removed from the home, Inuit regions still struggle with their custom adoption and foster care system.

Some government regulations make the customary adoption process longer and more bureaucratic that it’s traditionally been in Inuit communities, Kinnon said.

“We need to increase support for customary adoption and build up the support to extended families,” she said. “Currently, there is no monetary support for children in extended family placements, such as in the case of foster care. This is an opportunity to use an Inuit practice and give it more support.”

Along with increased support for customary adoption, the report calls on regions to foster more community support for children and families in the system.

Some of its recommendations look to other Inuit regions which have taken the lead on certain issues.

The report notes that a program in the Nunatsiavut region offers training programs to potential foster families.

Another program in the same region gathers together case workers for regular meetings to review the cases of children in care, to ensure that their needs are being met.

The report also recommends cultural competency training for social workers to help reduce biases and miscommunication, like the partnership now being developed by the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre and the Ottawa Children’s Aid Society.

And the advisory group who contributed to the report all encouraged Inuit communities to use their local justice system to drive change, pointing to a recent lawsuit filed in Nunavut by a parent whose children were removed in 2009.

The ruling that followed found that parts of Nunavut’s Child and Family Services Act – specifically, sections dealing with the removal of children from their homes —were in violation of the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms and ordered the government of Nunavut to amend its act within a year.

Inuit Tuttarvingat, the Ottawa-based and Inuit-focused centre of the National Aboriginal Health Organization, is directed and advised by a number of different Inuit organizations and regional governments.

Most recently, they were asked to look specifically at social services for children in Inuit communities across the country.

With the release of its report on child welfare, Ashoona Bergin says she hopes policy makers and program funders will take a closer look at family support for children in the system.

See the full report here.