Under the bureaucratic language, recommendation number 5 to the Ministry of Children and Family Development is chilling: “That MCFD take steps to support child-protection social workers to adhere to policy on response times to child-protection reports and ensure children are seen during child-protection investigations.”
“Ensure children are seen.” The representative for children and youth included that in her report on a horrendous case of child neglect because, although social workers received eight formal reports and did four assessments of the 12-year-old boy, they didn’t lay eyes on him until the final assessment.
Child-protection workers do a difficult job, but how is it possible that a boy with autism who was known to the ministry for nine years and had been pulled out of school by his mother for five years went unseen by the people who were supposed to be watching out for him?
When he was finally rescued, severely underweight and covered in filth, the scene left the first responders traumatized.
We should also be traumatized. Because we have been down this road too many times. Too many reports and inquiries have exposed sickening neglect.
Yet after all those words spoken and written, workers have to be told — again — that you can’t investigate suspected neglect without looking at the child. If the mother’s excuses turned away a social worker once, the second set of excuses should have been a giant red flag.
The government promises to fix the problems, as governments always do. It is heartbreaking that something so fundamental still needs to be fixed.
