daphne bramham: why are so many kids in b.c. government care going missing?
opinion: perhaps too many find government care so bad, they'd rather be homeless
4 minute read
a youth homeless count in metro vancouver is expected to give the regional district a better idea of the extent and causes of youth homelessness in the region.
ian macalpine
/
postmedia
the faces of missing kids peer out from posters on downtown windows and utility poles, put there by concerned family and friends begging for help in finding them.
walk around downtown vancouver and the downtowns of most canadian cities these days and you’ll see groups of homeless kids with backpacks, dogs, bicycles and false bravado hanging around empty storefronts or fast-food outlets.
every year, there seem to be more of them. but until now, nobody added it up in the way that jennifer charlesworth has done.
from april to december last year, charlesworth, b.c.’s representative for children and youth, received more than 500 reports about 198 kids in government care who were missing or lost. of those, 37 went missing more than once a month.
every one of those kids was at risk because they’re largely untethered from family and community ties. because of addictions or mental health problems, many were at risk of life-altering injuries due to toxic drug overdoses or self-harm.
during those nine months, four of the lost kids died.
more than 1,000 calls a month were logged by the ministry of children and family development about kids in government care who were missing. hard to believe, but the ministry logged them not as safety concerns, only lost or “awol.”
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taken together, there were nearly 470 children in government “care” who were missing each month.
and that’s only a snapshot. in her recent report, charlesworth put caveats on those numbers.
“there is currently no complete and accurate measure,” she wrote, adding that “monitoring data for missing children is inconsistent and unreliable due to reporting compliance and policy issues.”
the ministry’s weekly log of lost kids was found to be dependent on incidents reported to the representative or by the media and only included those missing for more than seven days.
lost kids are required to be reported to the representative within 24 hours. that happened in less than a quarter of the cases. the remainder were filed between two and 2,187 days after the disappearances. the average time was 53 days.
the report suggests that the child- and youth care system is so bad that more than 12,000 times last year, kids — mostly teens between 14 and 18 — decided that homelessness and the risks of street life were preferable to returning to government care.
most were “lost” for an average of 13 days. most fled not from family homes, but from “staffed residential facilities.”
these days, so-called care can include being housed in a shelter, a hotel or even living alone on a “youth agreement.”
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of the missing, two-thirds were indigenous and 40 per cent were girls. charlesworth called the child welfare system a pipeline to child exploitation and sex trafficking because it fails to provide the protection, care and understanding that these kids so desperately need.
separated from community, friends and family (including other siblings in care), they have what charlesworth called “the sense of unbelonging.” once in care, far too many are being moved and moved and moved again.
their disconnection is exacerbated by a chronic shortage of social workers, poor retention rates of experienced ones, conflicted collaboration among professionals who are often at odds over what’s best for the child, and a general lack of services, particularly in the areas of mental health and addictions.
sadly, the report reminded me of a conversation i had more than a decade ago with a social worker who despaired about how kids in care were treated.
he told me when he first went to remove children from their family homes to a foster home or from one foster home to another, their meagre possessions were inevitably thrown into green garbage bags.
it signalled for him not only contempt for what little they had, but for those displaced children themselves. it’s why he constantly scoured thrift stores for suitcases and backpacks. and why he helped children carefully pack their belongings in them.
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it appears little has substantively changed.
charlesworth wrote that there are still many good people working in the system. but it’s a system that continues to fail when it comes to deeply traumatized, troubled and vulnerable children.
lack of services aside, there is something terribly wrong when any missing child or teen isn’t considered an urgent priority — especially kids who are highly vulnerable to exploitation.
there’s a prejudice against these kids that’s embedded in the ministry’s missing child policy. calls “identifying late-returning home youth as ‘a missing person’ place an unnecessary and unmanageable burden on both mcfd/centralized screening staff and police/rcmp resources,” it says.
yet, as charlesworth pointed out, the b.c. provincial policing standards define a “missing person” as “anyone reported to police or by police as someone whose whereabouts are unknown, whatever the circumstances of their disappearance, and who are considered missing until located.”
it’s not easy being a parent to one child, let alone the more than 5,000 that the b.c. government has in its care.
but no responsible parent delays reporting a lost child or teen. no responsible parent doesn’t immediately seek help to find them.
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and, if it weren’t so boldly stated in policy, it would be unimaginable that reporting someone missing could be considered an unnecessary and inconvenient burden.
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