Well the public has only limited information that is true.
Customarily the public has only what comes from a public news source like CBC.
Kathy Tomlinson has completed videod pieces on the Baynes' story well over one year ago and of course much of her information was supplied by the Baynes. They did provide her with verifiable documentation which she had opportunity to review and evaluate. Her videoss were exposes of a sort and critical of the Ministry of Children.
The public does not generally approve of the State removing children from their parents so when a story like this breaks, the expressions are predictable.
CBC encourages comments to its online stories and other readers can approve or disapprove, that is, thumbs up or thumbs down the comments. You should hear a few from,
The April 3, 2009 article called 'Ministry Disregarded Legal Advice to Return Seized Children', which received 102 comments and thousands of hits. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/04/03/bc-surrey-parents-fight.html Trees Are Good wrote: “ This is a disgraceful example of how this government deals with the best interest of our most vulnerable citizens. Even after overwhelming testimony by their own legal counsel, they have still resorted to the political safety of rigid procedure. Return these children to the protection of the people who care about them most now!! Anything less is child abuse by the state!!” 174 thumbs up / 18 thumbs down
Deputy Dawg wrote: “Now if this isn't a winnable lawsuit I don't know what is.. being the father of a two year old I know what I would do to any bureaucracy that kept me from her on an unsubstantiated whim.” 121 thumbs up / 13 thumbs down
Rayser 213 wrote: “The Inmates are Running The Asylum! They can run but they can't hide! Justice Delayed is Justice Denied! When is this Agency going to think of the best interest of the Family & not protect itself from Courts?” 63 thumbs up / 7 thumbs down
ramont wrote: “paul & zabeth, i feel for you sooo much. i went through a painfully similar ordeal in the late eighties. it was horrible. our family has never completely recovered. we all paid a price. we temporarily lost our children, then regained them but with restrictions. we all still cry from the pain and memory. during that era it felt like a witch hunt. our lawyers at the time told us not to go public with it and I've always regretted listening to them. you are better having as many people aware and on your side. when these situations are kept 'private' there is more opportunity for further abuse of authority. all the power to you. do not back down. do not be intimidated. your love and the truth will win out eventually.” 50 thumbs up / 3 thumbs down
Mighty Rearranger wrote: “Wow! These two are getting a lot of airtime on CBC, I think I am getting fed up with the oh so obvious fake looks of concern and please pity poor old me from the mother!” 7 thumbs up / 55 thumbs down
Raphael Alexander wrote: "I hope that the parents get their kids back, and then sue the government for millions. And I hope they get every penny, even if it does come from our tax dollars. Perhaps they can heal after all this is over by suing the incompetence out of the government and squeezing them for every gut-wrenching penny of bureaucratic idiocy. The nanny state has become the child abusers. Hands off Big Brother!" 49 thumbs up / 6 thumbs down
Ron; a very good reminder that people like Kathy Tomlinson are following the Bayne case and are waiting for the ruling. Judging by the public comments that you have outlined, the public has little trust in the child welfare bureaucrats. This will be a huge political liability for the incumbent premier and one he will not cherish at present. Maybe he will finally do something assertive about reigning in his deputy minister and others and ensure that case management protects timeliness and continuity of care.
ReplyDeleteRemember folks, that the Baynes go to court on Thursday next to hear Finn Jensen finally (we hope) conclude his arguments and to hear the petition and counter-petition for matters of access. My wishes are with Paul and Zabeth Bayne that the court grants them the type of access that they have asked for until the final verdict. Then I hope that their access will be total. Let us hope that they will soon be in the same shoes as every other mother and father of young children and they are wondering how they will ever find the energy to deal with the hundred issues that come up every day. I seem to remember that I used to go to bed at night feeling pretty tired. Good Luck!!
There has been recent discussion about a matter periodically raised by Ms.Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafonde. That is the matter that so many children in care do badly in school and in general and the general achievement is below community norms.
ReplyDeleteThe problem that I have with this is that everything lacks context and without context statistics mean very little. One of the problems is that the Childrens ministry and the previous amalgamated social service ministry never did any research to really get an accurate picture. A former director of research admitted to me that they did not want to stir up controversy and would rather leave it alone. I once did a longitudinal study of 700 children in care and I found that popular concepts were not borne out. For instance, I got very different results than obtained by Prof. Henry Maas in his study. I had the advantage of total context. You see we already know that many children come into care exactly because they have many developmental problems and their parents can no longer cope with them. It has long been known that most children come into care from the poorest families. These people are often the poorest because they have few lifeskills, are often of low intelligence,or have serious addiction problems. So we are selecting out children who have lower genetic inheritances, or may have suffered foetal alcohol syndrome and general neglect and poor nutrition in infancy.
Many other children have special needs. I recently met two social workers who had adopted a child with Downs syndrome. They told me what a joy this child had been to them for the last twenty years and how they could not love her more. Her middle class natural parents had been so devastated at bearing an abnormal child that they simply could not accept her. She might easily have been a long term foster child and of course she might never graduate from grade 12. Another statistic wihout contextt. Look at the Bayne case. If they had not had the misfortune of having two premature children, they would never have lost their children. There would have been no mistaken diagnosis on their second child, who was born 15 weeks early. There would have been no 'previous intake' to alarm the social worker and the little girl would not have been so fragile. Once more the reason that these children came into care was related to their special needs. A fifteen week premature child may take years to achieve normal milestones.
Another large intake group comes from children who come into care when they are much older and who have a history of severe behaviour problems. Some are adolescent or pre-adolescent children who have self-destructive lifestyles. Most of these kids are severely damaged before they come into care. Often there is no choice but to take them into care because the parents will no longer care for them. Some of these quite young children have severe addiction problems and run the streets. If they die of an overdose on the street society has failed them. If they die of an overdose while in a foster home, we blame the foster home or the whole foster care system.
Many of these children are quite unsuitable to be placed in a normal family care home and what is expected of the foster parents is quite unrealistic. They get little support from the ministry and are blamed if anything goes wrong.
I only want to write enough to illustrate how complex the problem can be and how meaningless the overall statistics can be without context. It would be of great help to Ms. Turpel-Lafonde if Mary Polak would work closely with her and find out how matters could be researched so that more useful information could be obtained and better solutions found.
Ray,
ReplyDeleteI am surprised that you take the above position, given your condemnation of the Ministry as a whole (or what appears to be your condemnation). That is, I am surprised that you take the position that children are coming into care because of some shortcoming of the parent, versus the corruption of the Ministry.
Given the comments made - all over the world - from parents whose children have been taken from them, the fact that their children were taken has nothing to do with their ability as a parent, nor their failure to provide, but rather it has everything to do with a corrupt child protection system that keeps pushing the envelope so that now children can be taken from parents ONLY on the basis that there is a possibility that they might be harmed in some way at some future date.
And it is still not rocket science to conclude that children who are taken from all they know and love will suffer trauma and long term harm. They don't have to already be victims of poverty or anything else, just the fact that they are torn from all the know and love is enough to screw them up for life. This is just common sense. To suggest otherwise is to completely disregard the sacred bond between parents and their children. Children are not shoes, that can be traded and moved about with no consequences.
Anon 11.54. My friend it is obvious that you live in an alternate reality. We cannot confuse you with the facts once your mind is made up. You are in total denial that there could be any admissions to care other than by a callous and brutal snatching by the ministry. Just where do you get your information other than from denial and wishful thinking. Lots of parents request care because they cannot cope with an out of control child, or one who is just so demanding that they give up. Because I deplore the appalling behaviour shown in the Bayne case, it does not mean that I have to go into denial about the real need to care for abandoned, deserted and evicted children. In my career twice as many children came into care by demand of the parent as by any other means. Thank heavens we had some wonderful people in the foster care system Now you are going to tell me that I never thought of trying to help the families, or I did not try hard enough because we had to keep the numbers up. If you want to be irrational I cannot do anything about it.
ReplyDeleteRay - Does the phrase "don't rationalize insanity with logic" come to mind? Or do you enjoy spinning wheels? (For the record, your points are well constructed).
ReplyDeleteRay,
ReplyDeleteI may indeed "live in an alternate reality," and not ready to be "confused with the facts." I may also be "irrational," in "denial," engaging in "wishful thinking," and so on.
However, I merely pointed out that you are making it sound like there are so many children who come into "care" because of their parents failings. Anyone who has spent any time researching child protection, whether it be in Canada or the UK or wherever, can see - very quickly - that it is not the shortcomings of parents, but rather the corruption of the system which deserves the blame.
Instead of pointing out the shortcomings of parents (e.g., their so-called poverty, which supposedly makes them less than good parents), why not point out the shortcomings of the child protection authorities that take children from parents JUST because they are poor.
By the way, do you have any way whatsoever to back up your statement that:
"In my career twice as many children came into care by demand of the parent as by any other means."
And as far as your final statements go, I wasn't planning on claiming you were trying to keep the numbers up and therefore took children from their parents - that wasn't in my mind whatsoever.
I am not saying their are no children that have bad parents. What I am saying is that whatever bad parents are out there is miniscule in comparison to the harm to families and to society that is posed by these corrupt child protection agencies, who are having such a vicious and detrimental effect on families and society. What I am saying is that I disagree with you with respect to how to deal with so-called bad or incompetent parents. I probably disagree with your definition of what a bad parent is.
I suspect that you might be - for my liking - too quick to put a child into "care," perhaps because you have a bias in favour of child protection (perhaps because you think back to rosier times, though I question whether those times ever existed), and against parents who are less than perfect (e.g., parents who are "poor"). I only suspect this, I do not know.
Again, it never occurred to me that you might have been like this (overly in favour of child protection intervention) because you wanted to "get the numbers up." I don't think that would have been your motivation. I don't think you are corrupt; I just think you are misguided (from my point of view) with respect to the role of government or private institutions and their rights with respect to intrusions into that most important and indispensable foundation of civilization and society, the family.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces. ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason
I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
-- Anais Nin
What Troubles Me is that I read somewhere these Children were to be returned to Family until it became Public in the News?
ReplyDeleteIs this all to teach people a so called lesson to not speak out against CPS/DFCS and thier corrupted heartless practices??