Report shines light on poverty’s role on kids in CAS system
TheStar.com – News/Insight – A new report cites poverty as a key factor in families who come into contact with the child protection system.
Aug. 15, 2016. By SANDRO CONTENT, ANews, Insight, and JIM RANKIN, Feature reporter, Staff Reporters
A new report that for the first time calculates the effect of poverty in Ontario child protection has found it plays a significant role in kids being taken from their families and placed into care.
Children whose families ran out of money for housing were twice as likely to be placed with foster parents or group homes, according to an analysis of Ontario children taken into care in 2013.
Similar rates were found for families who ran out of money for food or for utilities. Children with a parent suffering from addiction or mental health problems were also placed in care at about twice the overall rate.
“These families struggle to put food on the table, they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Some of them work two or three jobs,” said the report’s co-author, Deborah Goodman.
“And the reason children’s aid is in their lives is because of those vulnerabilities. They’re under a lot of stress and that affects their parenting,” added Goodman, a professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of social work and a senior official with the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.
Nico Trocmé, also a co-author, said families in each category highlighted in the report struggled with a host of difficulties, from financial stress and inability to access services to schools not meeting children’s needs.
“Running out of money for food is an indicator for a whole host of things going on that we can’t measure with a crude analysis,” he said. “It’s a combination of factors that undermine the family’s or the agency’s ability to find alternatives to placement.”
The poverty removal rates were extracted from the government-funded Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, compiled in 2013. A team of researchers examined a representative sample of 4,961 child protection investigations conducted by 17 children’s aid societies. The cases involved children up to 14.
Co-author Kofi Antwi-Boasiako, a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s faculty of social work, will be expanding the report into a full-fledged study.
Goodman credited the report with revealing “the elephant in the room.” Children’s aid societies have long witnessed the grinding effect of poverty on families but have rarely spoken out about it or pressured policy makers.
“We’re able to tell a story of maltreatment, but we have not done a very good job in telling a story about poverty,” Goodman said, referring to Ontario’s 47 privately run children’s aid societies.
She suggests silence suited the provincial government, in particular the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, which regulates child protection and funds societies with $1.5 billion annually.
“The ministry has been pretty clear with us that advocacy is not part of our mandate,” Goodman said. “It’s not like they’re asking for the (poverty) data. They’re not.”
The effect of provincial policies on struggling families was especially apparent in the late 1990s, when the Conservative government slashed welfare payments and social service funding. At the same time, it introduced in child protection the notion of maltreatment by “omission,” including not having enough food in the home. The number of children taken into care spiked.
The new report also points to poverty as a key reason for the disproportionate number of black children in care. An ongoing investigation by the Star revealed that on a September day in 2013, 42 per cent of kids in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto had at least one black parent — more than five times the proportion of children and teens in the city who identify as black in census data.
Studies based on Canadian census data indicate that non-white Canadians are three times more likely to live in poverty, an inequality fuelled by systemic racism in the job market and barriers to accessing services.
At the same time, community advocates insist black and aboriginal families are under greater scrutiny from police and schools, services that report kids to children’s aid societies.
“The fundamental bias is that black families in Toronto have higher unemployment rates, are much more likely to be living in poverty, to be living in substandard housing, and to be going to schools that are not meeting their needs appropriately,” said Trocmé, director of the school of social work at McGill University.
“It’s harder being a black parent in Toronto than being a white parent.”
But the report indicates that once children’s aid societies investigate, racial bias is not a factor in children being taken into care within 30 days – the period selected for analysis. When the report’s authors controlled for poverty, they found black kids were taken into care at the same rate as white kids.
Aboriginal children were the only visible minority group in which race was a factor in placement. When poverty was controlled for, they were placed in care at rates more than twice that of white children. Aboriginal leaders have widely denounced the lack of services to support families, particularly in northern Ontario communities.
Community advocate Anthony Morgan, until recently a lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic, applauded the report for highlighting “the racialization of poverty.”
“It is a conversation we’re not having as courageously and as honestly as we need to,” he said. “What is it going to take? Are we waiting for a catastrophic social crisis within the African Canadian community before we have targeted programs for African Canadian children and families?”
But Morgan criticized the report for “the way it seems to minimize the impact of anti-black racism or racism generally” within children’s aid societies. Black parents have long complained of cultural bias when investigated. And the ministry is backing a province-wide project, struck by the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, to reform how societies deal with black families.
Trocmé, who also co-authored a recent government review that sharply criticized the quality of care that children receive, stressed the report should not lead societies to assume they are free of racism. It is silent on a long list of areas were bias could be a factor. For example, a study by the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto found that black children stay longer in foster care or group homes than white children.
Caroline Newton, a spokeswoman for the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, says the report makes clear that keeping children out of care requires much more than the efforts of societies, whose primary mandate is protection.
“We’re the emergency room,” she said, adding that no more than 4 per cent of children investigated get taken into care. She called for a government approach that integrates services in a way that supports and keeps families healthy, particularly those who are socially and economically marginalized.
On average, 15,625 Ontario children were in foster or group-home care in 2014-15. The latest figures indicate that only 2 per cent of children are removed from their home due to sexual abuse and 13 per cent for physical abuse. The rest are removed because of neglect, emotional maltreatment and exposure to violence between their parents or caregivers.
By the numbers
42% of children in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto in 2013 were black or had one black parent.
8% of people under 18 in Toronto are black.
23% of Ontario children in care are First Nations.
2.5% of people under 18 in Ontario are First Nations.
2.3% of Ontario children in care are Métis — 3.4 times their share of the under-18 population.
0.47% of Ontario children in care are Inuit — 11.3 times their share of the under-18 population.
54 per 1,000 children: the rate at which white children are investigated
75 per 1,000 children: the rate at which black children are investigated
126 per 1,000 children: the rate at which aboriginal children are investigated
Sources: Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, OnLAC annual survey, Barbara Fallon et al
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Tags: child care, crime prevention, featured, ideology, participation, poverty, standard of living, youth
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