Inquiry needed into children’s stories that don’t end well
I’ve been writing about child protection issues since 2004 when I got interested in the story of a Halifax couple embroiled in a highly publicized, 67-hour, shots-fired standoff with police. The issue: Children’s Aid had seized their five-month old daughter, not because of anything the couple had done to the child—in fact, evidence indicated they were loving, capable parents—but because they’d each been accused of abducting children during acrimonious custody battles in previous relationships.
Their story didn’t end well. The parents ended up in jail. Their daughter disappeared into the often self-serving anonymity of the province’s foster care system.
Then there was the story of the 16-year-old girl whose mental health issues were never addressed in foster or group homes. She ended up in court. The frustrated judge ordered the then-minister of community services—the girl’s legal guardian—to explain the mess. The minister never testified. Instead, the case was shuffled to the sidelines.
I caught up with the girl—now 18—last year. She told me she didn’t get any more help after her court case; instead, as soon as she turned 18, she was spit out into the adult welfare system. Good riddens.
Through her, I met a young man who’d been shipped off at the age of 12—against his parents’ wishes—to an Ontario residential treatment centre called Bayfield where he spent five years. Bayfield, he says, didn’t help. Instead, they prescribed drugs: he was on 13 medications at one point. Like the girl, Bayfield and child welfare washed its hands of him as soon as it could. The last I heard, he was living on the streets.
Which brings us to the current case: the 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy who was also sent to Bayfield. He didn’t do well either. Bayfield has now dumped him, but not before squeezing his grandparents/guardians out of his life—leaving the province, which claims it doesn’t have the facilities to treat him, to decide what to do next with him.
Whatever it does with the boy, the province should do something else; call a public inquiry into how we deal with troubled children and families. Something is clearly wrong.
Is the boy better off?
Forget dueling interviews, competing psychologists, contradictory studies, even the difference between physically assaulted and “placed in a position of control.”
Ask yourself one question: is the 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy at the centre of the controversy over his care better off now than when community services shipped him off to Ontario 13 months ago?
A quick recap: the boy, who suffers from an psychiatrist’s brew of disorders, had been raised by his grandparents since he was a toddler. By November 2008, his acting out—running away, stealing cars, doing drugs, selling his body—was so out of control his grandparents agreed to put him in the care of community services.
Instead of treating him here, the province decided he needed secure, long-term facilities it couldn’t provide. Last June, it shipped him off to Ontario’s Bayfield centre.
Is he better off?
According to his grandmother, he’s on heavy doses of drugs, some self-administered (she says Bayfield wants to add lithium to his medical cocktail); he rarely attends classes; and he has been what the reports call “restrained” on at least 10 occasions. Once, he ended up at the hospital; more recently, he claims he was beaten for asking to go to the washroom.
To complicate matters, Bayfield has done its best to cut the boy off from his grandparents, refusing some face-to-face visits, limiting phone calls to two, monitored 15-minute conversations a week and even, at one point, imposing a total contact blackout because the grandmother was “negative” on the phone. How? In one report I saw, the monitor complained she “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”
Last week, Vicki Wood, Nova Scotia’s director of child welfare, claimed “we make every effort to maintain the ties” between child and family. Really?
Wood also said: “There’s a forum for the family to bring forward their concerns. That would be the court, not a press conference.”
The problem is Nova Scotia’s family court seems like an extension of community services. And father-knows-better community services isn't willing to consider alternatives to out-of-province institutional treatment.
The boy is not better off.
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Previous stories
The tragedy of Trevor Zinck’s public meltdown
I’ve only met Trevor Zinck once. Back in 2007 when I was working on a story about the far-too-many children who fall through the cracks of our child welfare system and he was a fresh-faced NDP MLA, we both attended a meeting examining other, better child welfare models. Afterward, Zinck handed me his card, offered his assistance. He seemed earnest, and genuinely concerned.
How to square that Trevor Zinck with the off-the-rails unnatural disaster he has become this past month? The Trevor Zinck who allegedly played so fast and loose with his MLA expenses he got kicked out of the NDP caucus? The Trevor Zinck who stands accused of running up a $10,000 gambling debt on the credit card of a disabled friend for whom he was once a care-giver? The Trevor Zinck who now blames everyone else for his troubles?
The simple, and most likely answer is that Zinck’s “problems” with alcohol and gambling—which he has publicly acknowledged in an offhanded way but has clearly not yet accepted as serious, or seemingly done anything to deal with—have warped his political and personal judgments.
Without getting all-Dr.-Phil, it seems obvious Trevor Zinck is in denial.
When he got kicked out of the caucus, for example, Zinck dismissed concerns about his own alleged failure to pay routine bills for which he’d already been reimbursed. If there’d been a problem, he argued, it was just bookkeeping. And he’d taken care of it. He lashed out at Darrell Dexter, accusing the premier of plotting to oust him as a way to scare other unidentified NDP MLAs from voting against the government’s upcoming budget. And he claimed House Speaker Charlie Parker’s decision to ask the auditor general to look into his expenses was partisan and “unparliamentary.”
When his former friend reluctantly went public about Zinck’s alleged failure to repay the credit card debt, Zinck claimed the NDP put the man’s family up to it. The family denied the allegation.
Zinck’s most recent claim that all these unlikely conspiracies are somehow intended to undermine what he claims is widespread public support for him among his constituents appears—to be generous—delusional.
In the end, there are two issues here.
The first, of course, is the public issue of Trevor Zinck’s ability—and legitimacy—to continue as an MLA. Let’s leave that for today.
The larger, sadder and more human issue is that Trevor Zinck needs help. The tragedy is that he still doesn’t—or won’t—recognize just how much. Let’s hope, for his sake, that that changes. Before it’s too late.
Whose best interests?
For Family Court Judge Beryl MacDonald, the question seemed simple. Does she have the authority to order the minister of community services to provide a service the department, by policy, doesn’t offer? Her answer, delivered during a family court hearing this week, was equally simple. She does not.
The legal issue may be simple; the case is anything but. And her defensible judicial answer may conflict with the ultimate goal of our child protection legislation: the best interests of the child.
The case involves a troubled Cole Harbour teenager whose grandparents raised him. Two years ago, when they realized they could no longer cope—he has serious psychological problems—they sought help from community services. Instead, the government assumed his guardianship and—because Nova Scotia doesn’t have secure long-term youth facilities—shipped him off to Bayfield, an Ontario institution “for boys experiencing difficulties.”
His grandparents objected and began to act as the boy’s advocates. That made them intruders in the government’s and the institution’s father-knows-best care program.
At one point, after the grandmother complained publicly about his treatment, Bayfield refused her a face-to-face visit despite the fact she’d travelled to Ontario just to see her grandson. Bayfield has also occasionally cut off all communications between the child and his grandparents.
These days, telephone contact is tightly controlled and monitored. A recent note from Bayfield staff claims one conversation “was beginning to turn negative as it was ending.” This apparently referred to the fact the grandmother “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”
Doctors at Bayfield, who have prescribed Seroquel XR, an antipsychotic medication, allow the boy to take some of his daily dosage “as needed.” The province has authorized a dosage of up to 850 mg. per day. According to the website healthcentral.com, “the safety of doses above 800 mg/day has not been evaluated in clinical trial.” Drugs.com says Seroqel XR “should not given to anyone younger than 18 years old.”
The grandparents are just as concerned by what they see as escalating “incidents” of violence during which Bayfield staff “restrained” the boy.
My non-legal question is equally simple: Is this boy better off now than he was when he left Nova Scotia? What will he be like in three years when he becomes an adult and Bayfield spits him back out—as it has other Nova Scotia children.
The judge may see this as a narrow legal question. The Minister of Community Services should see it as a larger question. Is what her department is doing in the best interest of this—or any other—child?
Shipping off troubled kids not a solution
The real question, Dr. Charles Emmrys testified, is, “What works?”
What doesn’t work—what research shows doesn’t work, he adds—is shipping troubled kids out of their home provinces, away from family and community, and into residential institutions where they are more likely to be warehoused than treated.
Emmyrs, a Moncton-based clinical psychologist and court-recognized expert in adolescent behaviour disorders, is an advocate for what he calls the “messy stuff.” He argues governments should invest scarce resources in family, school and community supports instead of more buildings. Community-based care, he acknowledges, is “a long and tedious process, but it works.”
Emmrys was testifying earlier this week in the case of a 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy currently in Bayfield, a long-term Ontario treatment centre “for boys experiencing difficulties.” This boy had been diagnosed with myriad psychological disorders: attention deficit hyperactivity, alcohol-related neural development, impulse control. Mostly, he ran. He ended up selling his body, stealing cars, doing drugs.
His grandparents, who’d raised him since he was a toddler, couldn’t cope on their own. In October 2008, they asked the Department of Community Services for help.
Community Services’ idea of helping was to make him a ward of the province and ship him off to Bayfield last June.
When his grandparents tried to visit him in September, they say they were shocked by Bayfield staff’s hostility and unwillingness to let them spend time with their grandson.
They’re now asking Family Court here to order Community Services to bring him back to Nova Scotia.
The real question, of course, is whether the boy is benefitting at Bayfield.
My own anecdotal experience isn’t encouraging.
Two years ago, while researching a story on children who slip through the social welfare cracks, I met a local street kid I called Carl. Carl had spent five years—from age 12—in Bayfield for problems that sound remarkably similar to this boy.
As do his treatments, which included a lot of drug therapy.
At one point, Carl says he was on 13 different psychotropic drugs. “I was like a zombie.” Bayfield officials also discouraged Carl’s mother from visiting or talking with her son on the phone.
Did it work?
No.
After Bayfield spit Carl out at 17, he wound up as a psych patient in Nova Scotia where doctors finally took him off all the meds Bayfield had prescribed. When I met him, Carl was living on the streets, and didn’t have much hope for himself or his future.
What works—and what doesn’t? Good questions. It’s time the government started asking them.
They say it’s your birthday
Earlier this month, she turned 19. She is now officially an adult. Not that she ever had a childhood.
I’d tell you her name, but I can’t. Besides, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.
This might.
In the fall of 2006, when she was just 16, she was, briefly, a media sensation when she landed in provincial youth court facing 32 criminal charges involving incidents that had occurred in and around group homes where she’d been living.
Her lawyer told Judge Pam Williams she was a “troubled” girl who needed daily psychiatric care. She wasn’t getting it, the lawyer said, because the province had failed to provide the necessary resources. Frustrated, Judge Williams ordered then-Community Services Minister Judy Streatch—the official legal guardian for all 2,000 kids her department had placed “in care”—to personally attend a case conference to discuss how to get the girl the help everyone agreed she needed.
And then, of course, all hell broke loose. A cabinet minister responsible for an individual child? It just wasn’t on. In the end, the judge rescinded her unprecedented order.
But it didn’t matter.
By then, the girl had disappeared. And no one seemed eager to find her.
I did. Ten months later. We met in a Subway restaurant. I was doing a story about “Lost Children” for The Coast and I wanted to know about her life in care, and what she remembered of life with her mother.
“I remember she used to buy me cats,” she told me. “And we fed the swans. We moved around a lot too. I remember that.”
She couldn’t remember how many foster families she’d lived with. She remembered none could cope with her. “I was frustrated,” she says. She missed her mother.
In 1999, when she was just nine years old, community services officials obtained court approval to remove her from her mother’s care because—they claimed—they could raise her better than her mother.
The girl’s mother wasn’t a perfect parent. She grew up in an abusive home herself, got shunted to foster care, became pregnant at 15. She had no idea how to be a mother. “If only they’d helped my parents be better parents,” she told me sadly. “If only they’d helped me…”
They didn’t. Instead, they took her daughter. By all accounts, they didn’t such a good job.
Now the girl is 19, an adult, on her own. The cycle continues.
Happy Birthday.
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.