Quote:
Originally Posted by redforever
And part of the problem lies with kinship fostering. The department has assumed this is always in the best interests of Native children when that is clearly not the case.
|
This is another case where the public looks for easy answers to complex and intractable problems.
Many native children grow up in high-risk households. So the government can:
A) Take them out of the home and hope a foster home provides a better environment. This exposes them to condemnation if something bad happens to the child in foster care, and adds to politically unwelcome statistics on native children being removed from their homes.
B) Keep them in the high-risk environment and hope the parents can turn things around, or nothing too terrible happens to the children. This exposes them to accusations of not stepping in and doing something to protect children in a home they knew was unsafe.
If they put the child in foster case, they can:
A) Put them in foster care with a kinship (native) family to meet the political mandate to keep native children in native households. Since there's rarely an abundance of healthy and secure households in that kinship, this may mean putting the child in an less safe household than if they sent them outside the kinship.
B) Put them in foster care outside the kinship group. This means upsetting political considerations and native groups by taking native children out of native homes and putting them in non-native homes. Also, a great many of these non-native foster care homes already have 4-6 children in them. Not exactly an ideal home for vulnerable children.
Given the chronic shortage of foster homes, child services is often faced with choosing from several bad options.
Foster-parent shortage across Canada reaching a crisis point
Quote:
In 2014-15, Ontario had about 21,314 kids being served in care – down about 2,000 from the year before. There were 4,800 average homes available for foster care in 2014-15, down from about 6,000 in 2010-11.
“It continues to go down,” Ms. Demers said. “There really is a crisis.”
|