SEIZING CHILDREN

Each year in each of our provinces in Canada, police officers and child-welfare caseworkers remove children of all ages from the custody of their parents to protect them from alleged abuse or neglect. Some of these “emergency removals” are pre-authorized by judges in ex parte proceedings until the full story is known. In other cases the removals are achieved solely on the authority of the law enforcement or child welfare agency responding to a concerned call they have received. Depending on ages of children and circumstances, the children are predictably seized without warning from their homes or schools, subjected to intrusive interrogations, medical examinations and occasionally strip-searched. They are required to live in foster homes or group homes while the legal system grinds toward a settlement of their future.

THE WAY I SEE AYN VAN DYK'S CASE

We are all waiting for her return, none more apprehensively than Amie Van Dyk and her ex husband Derek Hoare. They are the parents of Ayn Van Dyk, the twelve-year old autistic child who innocently meandered from her family back yard in 2011. Ayn was ten years old at that time. Even Ayn with imperfect cognitive capability would have reasoned to stay in her own back yard had she known that the consequence would be her removal from her family for over two years.

Amie and Derek have been informed some months ago that they can expect Ayn to be returned to them some time during the month of September 2013.

Ayn was ten years old when she scaled a fence that surrounded the back yard. She was not affecting a prison break. She was not violating a community standard. She was not disrupting anyone’s peace, although she did cost the taxpayer some money because of the urgently placed 911 call from her father summoning the help of RCMP who sent a helicopter into the Abbotsford skies to locate his child. Even Derek with his anxious parental response would have reasoned to summon friends instead of RCMP had he known that the outcome would be the agony of separation from his daughter for most of these past two years.