By
James Turner
,Winnipeg Sun, November 22, 2012.
There's a few things about Phoenix Sinclair that stuck out to Kim Hansen as she and her Child and Family Services colleagues seized the three-year-old from her father's home out of fear it was unsafe for her.
But the most telling was how the well-behaved little girl kept calling every woman she saw "mom" despite being total strangers.
"She was calling me 'mom' the entire time," Hansen on Thursday told an ongoing inquiry into Phoenix's death. "When they took her to (an emergency hotel-room placement) she was calling the caregivers there mom," said Hansen.
"To me that just shows that there's no consistent care provider — it's a lack of attachment," she told inquiry Commissioner Ted Hughes. Her mother, Samantha Kematch, in concert with boyfriend Karl McKay, would end up brutally abusing and murdering Phoenix in 2005.
CFS's June 23, 2003 apprehension of Phoenix marked the second time in her brief life she was placed in care. A few days later, social worker Laura Forrest would sit down with all available information about her case and deem it to be "high-risk." It was a finding contrary to what some of her social-work colleagues had believed in the past.
The crisis worker, Roberta Dick, admitted it wasn't unheard of in 2003 for some initial safety assessments to be downgraded in order to give overburdened social workers more time to deal with heavy workloads.
The assessments set out how quickly a CFS case worker was to tackle a case and ranged from within 24 hours (the highest priority) to five days (the lowest).
Dick she admitted Thursday she did consider elevating the required response time to 48 hours, but said it was common practice to try and give social workers some breathing room because they were so busy.
“We would often know when there were a lot of files open, and based on that we would try and balance the workload,” Dick said.
Dick testified she would never have “mischaracterized” a safety assessment where it was clear it needed an rapid response.
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By Steve Lambert, The Canadian Press, Nov. 22, 2012.
WINNIPEG -- A
Manitoba social worker says she "probably could" have done more to
check on a girl whose death is now the subject of a public inquiry, but she
feared that being too aggressive would backfire.
Laura Forrest took on Phoenix Sinclair's case in
February 2003, when the toddler was brought to hospital with an infection from
an object that had been lodged in her nose for three months. The hospital
reported the matter as a probable case of neglect.
Forrest told the
inquiry on Thursday that she went to the girl's home and was met by her father,
Steve Sinclair, who said Phoenix was being cared for by a family friend.
Forrest said she went back to the home a few times over the next four months,
always during the daytime, but there was no answer at the door.
Under
cross-examination, Forrest said she could have taken other steps such as
phoning other relatives, but didn't.
"I probably
could have done a few other things. I didn't at that time," Forrest said.
"I also don't know what else was going on for
me with other families."
"Did you ever
think of going there in the evening?" asked Jeff Gindin, the lawyer for
Steve Sinclair. "I did not, no," Forrest replied.
Forrest never saw
Phoenix, who was apprehended four months later when child-welfare workers
received an anonymous call that suggested the girl was at risk because Sinclair
was having drinking parties at his home.
Social workers went to the residence and found
Sinclair drunk, along with two friends who had passed out on the floor. More
social workers visited over the next 24 hours, by which time Sinclair had
started smoking marijuana, the inquiry was told.
"You've got a
little child of three with gangs, there's violence and drugs and weapons, and
no one seems to be taking care of (Phoenix)," said Kim Hansen, an
after-hours social worker who called police to help her take the girl into
care.
Phoenix was brought to a hotel to spend the night
with other social workers. Hansen was taken aback by the way the little girl
called every female she saw 'mom.'
"She was calling
me mom the entire time. I remember that. When I took her to the (hotel), she
was calling the caregivers there mom. To me that just shows that there's no
consistent care provider. It's a lack of attachment to a mother figure."
The removal from
Sinclair's home was just one of many wrenching events in Phoenix's short life.
She was seized by child-welfare workers several times and returned to her
mother, Samantha Kematch, a final time in 2004 -- the year before she was
beaten to death by Kematch and her boyfriend.
The inquiry has already heard evidence that social workers
failed to monitor Phoenix for months at a time. The hearings are to determine
how the little girl fell through the cracks of Manitoba child welfare and why
her death went undetected for nine months.
"Maybe in hindsight it would have been a better idea that I picked the moderate medical treatment (category), but I was also considering giving the assigned worker the ability to choose how soon they could go out and investigate based on their caseload demands," Roberta Dick, the social worker who received the hospital report, testified Thursday.
"Maybe in hindsight it would have been a better idea that I picked the moderate medical treatment (category), but I was also considering giving the assigned worker the ability to choose how soon they could go out and investigate based on their caseload demands," Roberta Dick, the social worker who received the hospital report, testified Thursday.
Phoenix would spend the
rest of her life in and out of foster care. In 2004 she was handed back to
Kematch, who by then was in a new relationship with Karl McKay. In 2005,
Phoenix was killed in the basement of the family home.
Kematch and McKay were
convicted of first-degree murder. Evidence at their trial showed they had
abused and neglected the girl, sometimes forcing her to eat her own vomit and
shooting her with a BB gun.
The inquiry is still
in its early stages. It has yet to delve into why child-welfare workers removed
Phoenix from a foster home and gave her back to Kematch in 2004 and what, if
any, monitoring followed. Kematch and McKay's murder trial heard that a social
worker went to visit the family in 2005, was told Phoenix was sleeping and left
without seeing her.
I am going to take the liberty of my own blog space to set the record straight about what happened in my own experience as a social work student, the value to advocacy and social justice to social workers and what it is like to be a Christian social worker. online degree in social work
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