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 […]

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 […]

Child Welfare (The Coast) Oct. 25, 2007

Lost Children The province took Tina’s daughter in September 1999. "I honestly didn’t understand any of this and why it happened," she says. "I cried real hard." “I feel like Jesus,” Tina announces to no one in particular. We are sitting on a hard wooden bench outside Courtroom 1 in the Dartmouth law courts building, […]