The organizations that help indigenous children face greater challenges than do other social agencies, but they do it with fewer resources. And one of the effects is that too many children are being placed in care.
It’s a two-tier system, where funding for aboriginal children doesn’t match the need and doesn’t provide the resources to do the job.
A report by the province’s representative for children and youth says family-support services don’t have the money they need to help keep children with their families.
“The fact that 62 per cent of the kids in care are indigenous in a province where they represent less than 10 per cent of the child population is unacceptable,” Bernard Richard said. Of the 7,010 children in care in B.C., 4,367 are aboriginal. An aboriginal child is almost 17 times more likely to be in care than an non-aboriginal.
Discriminatory funding is just part of the problem, Richard’s report says. It’s compounded by poor communication and a lack of trust between governments and the agencies that serve indigenous children.
Twenty-three agencies delegated to help aboriginal families serve 1,900 of the aboriginal children who are in foster care in B.C. Six of those agencies are on Vancouver Island, serving First Nations from Alert Bay to the Saanich Peninsula and off-reserve children in Victoria.
Inadequate communication and funding are not new problems. Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett’s office said the ministry is working with the province and the First Nations Leadership Council to figure out how to improve the child-welfare system.
B.C. Children’s Minister Stephanie Cadieux, meanwhile, is lobbying the federal government for more money to fund the aboriginal agencies.
In other words, a lot of talking and report-writing is going on — as it has for decades. Meanwhile, too many aboriginal children are ending up in care.
The goal of effective child protection should be to make sure children don’t have to go into care unless it’s unavoidable. But funding works against that goal.
As one agency director put it in the representative’s report: “Right now, we’re still being funded based on the number of children in care. But if your ultimate goal is to keep children out of care, it’s a backwards setup.”
As in health care and other areas, prevention would be more effective than reaction, but too many of our systems are geared toward trying to fix people after they are broken, rather than keeping them from harm.
And even the fixing doesn’t happen in time, because inadequate funding means aboriginal social workers can’t get to children in a timely manner. Standards say they should respond within 30 to 45 days of getting a child-safety report, but ministry statistics show that almost 72 per cent of agency files had been open more than 90 days at the end of 2016.
Even 30 days would seem like torture to a child who needs help, so 90 must feel like abandonment.
Keeping indigenous children out of care is supposed to include culturally based prevention services, which are likely to be more effective, but workers say lack of staff and funding means those services are too often not being provided.
Richard does see hope in the province’s response to recommendations from Grand Chief Ed John and a boost in its funding.
As Richard says, to make a difference, the bureaucratic squabbles must end so everyone can put the focus where it matters: on the children.
