Nunavik’s shame

The first duty of any government is to provide for the security of its citizens, a principle that’s recognized in Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights, which, among other things, states that “Everyone has the right to… security of the person.”

This protects individuals not only from the arbitrary whims of state officials; it also implies that citizens should be protected from dangerous acts of omission, neglect or incompetence that may be committed by agents of the state.

A report done this year by Quebec’s human rights and children’s rights commission, and recently leaked to Nunatsiaq News, reveals that in Nunavik, endangered children cannot count on their government to make reasonable provisions for their security.

“The youth protection system is not currently functional,” the report says. You can’t say it any plainer than that.

The report is the result of an investigation into complaints made in 2002 by two Nunavik residents, concerning 13 children who did not get adequate services from youth protection workers. The provincial human rights commission then conducted a lengthy investigation.

To be fair, social services are extremely difficult to deliver in northern Canada, for a variety of reasons: trained, well-motivated social workers are hard to recruit and retain; child welfare laws contain ideas that are often at odds with Inuit culture; and in many communities, a multi-generational history of substance abuse, domestic violence and sexual abuse is deeply embedded in many families.

And social work, by its very nature, is a highly intrusive practice, especially in child welfare. To do their job, social workers sometimes have to walk into people’s homes, take their children, or counsel the break-up of families. Because of this, social workers themselves can become targets of abuse in their communities. It’s easy to understand how a child protection worker could be tempted to look the other way rather than act on behalf of an endangered or neglected child.

But even measured by the standards of northern Canada, what they found is shocking.

Here are a few findings, picked at random:

* Children in foster homes who don’t get enough food or clothing, and in some cases not even a mattress or a blanket;
* Children in foster homes who are abused within the very foster homes that are supposed to provide a safe shelter for them;
* A children’s group home co-ordinator who showed up for duty drunk when on call;
* The widespread sexual abuse, and even rape, of children as young as three or four years;
* Some abuse complaints that are neither investigated nor evaluated;
* Some complaints that are not pursued if they involve families that are “friendly” with child protection staff;
* Staff who think that mental health problems in teenagers are caused by a “demonic spirit” that takes possession of a person.

Keep in mind that the report that fell into our hands only deals with the Ungava region, and is only part of a much bigger document that also includes the Hudson Bay region of Nunavik.

In response, the Youth Protection service has started to provide better training of its workers, more visits by child psychiatrists, a series of FASD workshops, workshops for parents, protocol changes at group homes and so on. They’ve also made some picky comments about some minor factual errors in the report, and they’ve pointed out that the Nunavik region does not get enough resources from the province to do an adequate job.

But there’s no sign that they have grasped the enormity of the scandal that the human rights commission has revealed, and little sign that they’re prepared to acknowledge the extent to which they’re accountable for it.

The report contains a strong core of truth. It shows that when criminal acts against defenceless children are revealed to the authorities, there’s no guarantee that they will be dealt with properly.

It’s interesting to note that Canada’s Inuit organizations announced this week that they’ve gone to court to seek compensation on behalf of people who were abused at residential schools when they were children.

It would be shame indeed, if, 20 or 30 years from now, the survivors of Nunavik’s Youth Protection service also had to go to court to seek compensation for the damage done to them by an incompetent system that is not protecting them. JB