Reconciliation in Child Welfare Needed? / Part 299 / For Love and For Justice / Zabeth and Paul Bayne/

MPATAPO = reconciliation

As a society we have committed ourselves to protect children and youth and to promote their well-being. Parents are under implicit obligation to provide life essentials, safety and opportunity to their own children. So sure are we about this obligation that when some parents are incapable of providing these life essentials we must authorize representative service agencies to make these provisions. We believe that our extended families, our church communities, our tribal families can address many of these life essentials. When these are inadequate we have insured that that these obligations which also apply to our local community, tribal, provincial and federal governments, will be addressed by the same. We acknowledge that at infrequent grievous times children may need to be removed from their homes to insure their safety and meet their life needs. It is our intention that our representative agencies will spare no efforts to make it possible for these children to rejoin their families.

Intrinsic to that explicit set of obligations is an unsurrendered right of parents to determine appropriate measures of safety and well-being for their children. We have never intended that the welfare systems that we as a people establish should disregard our parental choices by imposing different standards of safety and well-being upon us and our children. We expect our representative child welfare agencies to be dedicated to support of children, youth and families rather than superiority over these citizens. We rigorously urge our government representatives to deal with concerns about parental child care with understanding rather than suspicion. We adamantly reject authorizing our child welfare agencies to empower child welfare agencies to remove our children from their homes as a precondition to providing safety and meeting life needs.

Presently, there are more negative outcomes to families involved with our child welfare agencies than the public knows or perhaps wants to acknowledge. These stories must be told because they are often the stories of common people with few resources. Our society must be profoundly committed to aiding the vulnerable, voiceless and disfranchised among us. That means that all of us must make a unified decision that reconciliation is needed in child welfare. Our child welfare network of services must be reconciled to the rest of us. We can do better can't we?

MPATAPO is a West African symbol for reconciliation, peacemaking and pacification and represents the bond or knot that binds parties in a dispute to a peaceful, harmonious reconciliation. It's a symbol of peacemaking after strife. I have learned that the West African explanation of origin for this sign may have competition and that there are numerous claims to this symbol, called variably Gorgon Loop, Saint John's Arms, Saint Hannes Cross and in fact the Command Key on the Mac. Wikipedia has them all.