Thread by @sunnshiiny

When the indigenous community states that genocide is ongoing, this is what they mean.

Most of the children in care who died were indigenous children.

While the institution changed, the result is the same. Children dying in record numbers.

https://twitter.com/calgaryherald/status/1463770899388194817

If every child matters, make these children matter the most.

Society should be doing all it can to provide for these children and young adults.

Shuffled from home to home. Familial ties cut or severely strained, these kids are vulnerable.

Why bother removing them from their caregivers if they end up dead from suicide, substance abuse or physical abuse?

Much like churches (Protestant & Catholic) profited financially from residential schools, private (non profit) agencies profit from children being placed in care.

It’s an industry. Specializing in housing abused children.

Wasn’t that the rationale used to create Residential Schools? Savage pagans we’re deemed incompetent to raise their own children so they were whisked away to residential institutions who received payment to school them?

Often skimping on food, clothing, educational material, and public health to skim meagre profits then redirected to the churches and clergy?

Resulting in several deaths of children who were then buried in unmarked graves?

How many of the children who die in care are now buried in publicly owned burial plots with barely more than a name and date of birth to remember them? Their existence with family a distant memory.

But this report reveals it isn’t just indigenous children.

It’s children from high stress families.

Wouldn’t a devastating and isolating pandemic be reason to increase the budget to assist families to cope? Rather than looking to save a few $ by cutting off the ones who come to adulthood in unnatural circumstances away from supports?

What are the manners of death? It’s hardly disease in this day and age.

How did these children die? WTF is going on at Child Welfare that so many children are coming to mortal harm?

The minister speaks about the issue like it’s a math problem. Fully committed to bringing those numbers down by examining what happened.

These are vulnerable children and young adults. Not statistics. Each one is a human being. Not a source of income or burden to bear.

Children are our most precious resource. They are our future. They are the single most important resource we have. And these children, under the design of this system, are sacrificed to provide an industry with jobs and a means to maintain their social status as the unwanted.

It breaks my heart to see these children treated no better than cattle or sheep. At least with barn animals we know and accept each individual represents capital. Lose a cow or sheep and you lose the capital invested in its upkeep and any profit to be made.

Abused children are not commodities. Child welfare is not supposed to be an industry concerned about profits and expenditures. It’s an institution to protect children from abusive family situations. However, it is anything but.

I have long considered aid services design structure as part of the problem. The ideological basis that lays at the foundation of homeless shelters, group homes and institutional care is centuries old. And it Emirates from church charities.

Why do we house people to sleep and then send them out to fend for themselves during the day? Because that’s what churches did when they permitted the homeless to sleep in their basements and church pews. They had to get up early because services were at 9:00 am.

They had to clear the church for parishioners to attend church. Only welcome to stay if they listened to the sermons and participated by allowing themselves to be proselytized.

That’s how we got shelters that permit people to sleep and then kick them out first thing in the AM.

I lived in a shelter for a few months as a youth. I was 16 & couldn’t stand my mother’s mental illness & the expectations to take over caring for her. So I ran away. Maybe it was cowardly. But I couldn’t handle the stress of dealing with my mom who used alcohol to self medicate.

After putting us in danger by allowing random strange men into our house, I left after one of those men groped me while I was asleep. He got a black eye. I left that afternoon.

Had anyone reported my mother’s behaviour, my brothers and I would have been placed in care.

But no one cared enough about us children to report the abuse.

I failed grade 11 that year. The chaos in my life was so bad I just couldn’t concentrate or attend class and pay attention.

No one intervened. As an indigenous youth, no one expected me to amount to much.

I was an honours student in grade 10. Enrolled in the Catholic system’s first honours classes. But my indigenous status meant I was a write off.

The shelter was unregulated at the time. Upwards of 60 youth were given shelter every night to keep them off the street.

First thing in the morning we were kicked out into the street and given a bagged lunch, a bus ticket and encouragement to get a job.

No counselling. Just the expectation to go make money and move out.

This was supposed to be caring? Compassionate?

I had been sexually abused by a stranger in my home, my mother was drunk most of the time, rent and utilities were not paid regularly, food was hit and miss.

But if I got a job, everything would be ok. I didn’t want a job. I wanted to go back to school. To be a teenager.

To be normal.

That’s what most troubled youth want. Just to be normal for once. To have people who care about them that they can depend upon.

But shelters don’t offer that. Neither does child welfare. Workers are paid to make sure children stay productive & out of trouble.

Children in need are a source of income. A burden to society. An unwanted and unloved human being who needs to toughen up and learn to take care of themselves. And stop relying on society to look after them.

That’s the underlying narrative behind social support system’s design.

I think it’s about time we changed that approach to one that’s a little more humane and doesn’t treat children as capital resources who mature out of their capital worth to an industry.

I survived that trauma. I went back to high school and repeated grade 11.

Then I went to university. And graduated with an 8.4 average. I came back and volunteered at the shelter after graduating. The first thing I was asked was if I finished high school.

Vulnerable children deserve better than to be treated like cattle.

But it won’t be UCP who starts treating children & their families like human beings.

Change will come from society. From people who do care. That isn’t the UCP.

Emanates*