Caroline Tair with Emil Brandon of STR8-UP, who appears in Tait's documentary.

Recent research by U of S professor Caroline Tait looks into the realities of the child welfare system in Saskatchewan, providing a sobering picture of a vital government program. The research resulted in a documentary on child welfare entitled Child Welfare: the State as Parent, which was launched at the U of S on Oct. 7.

Tait’s research started with a simple question: “If the state is the parent, what kind of parent is it?” Seeking to answer it by looking at how ethical the government’s policies are, Tait and her team decided to focus on multiple foster home placements.

“What happens when you have a child who is moved 10 times between the ages of zero and 18,” she asked. “Twenty times? We’ve had a child moved up to 70 times…. It’s not just that they’re removed from their biological families. It’s that they’re being bounced around, and how do they make any kind of connection to other people in society when they’re being bounced around like that?”

Tait’s research found that the state’s intervention is often more traumatic than leaving children in their homes would be.

The way the state deals with the children in its care has vast implications for Saskatchewan society, according to Tait. Not only do these children have difficulty connecting to anyone and develop problems related to that dissociation, but “right now we have more First Nations and Métis children in state care in our province than we did at the height of the residential school system.”

Tait stressed the importance of rethinking the current child welfare system, saying that rather than intervening once a family reaches crisis, the focus should be on prevention. She added that there are reports going back 20 years that have spoken to aboriginal people and come up with recommendations for changes to the child welfare system, but they are all too often ignored.

“It’s not that we don’t have enough resources,” she said. “We’re using them in an ineffective way.”

Connected to the focus on intervention is a concentration on surveillance. There is a “huge amount” of surveillance directed toward parents on social assistance, Tait said. This is part of the reason why families living in poverty see their kids taken into foster care more frequently than their affluent counterparts.

“It turns out that aboriginal people are very vulnerable in that way,” Tait said. “But this is not an issue that’s just about aboriginal people; this is about poverty.”

Unfortunately, though, this is an issue that affects aboriginal children and families disproportionately. While First Nations and Métis people make up just 9.2 per cent of Saskatchewan’s total population, they accounted for nearly 66 per cent of children in foster care in 2008-09.

Many of the cases Tait came across in her research were not children removed from their homes due to abuse, but because of neglect, an umbrella term so expansive as to be almost useless.

“That can be as simple as having a babysitter and going out for a couple of hours and that babysitter leaves,” Tait explained. “When you’re living in poverty, it’s hard to find reliable babysitters.”

Following on this, Tait’s research found that the state’s intervention is often more traumatic than leaving children in their homes would be.

“When the state takes a child in, it shouldn’t cause even more harm,” she said. “Taking kids into care is not the right answer [in many neglect cases]. The right answer is really preventing families from getting to that crisis.”

Along with a focus on poverty and on social marginalization, Tait advocates a move toward working with families as a whole and teaching mothers and fathers how to create and sustain healthier families.

She mentioned some of her own previous work in arguing this point.

“We know from that research that if you apprehend the children of a woman who is drinking when she’s pregnant or who has some substance abuse issues, we know that her rate of abuse will increase because there’s no support for her, because the mandate of child welfare is just the children. It’s not the parents.”

—
Photo: Ellen Whiteman