After
one-and-a-half years, I left my job as a child-protection social worker
in northern British Columbia at the province’s Ministry of Children and
Family Development.
I left an organization in the midst of both a staffing and an existential crisis.
The
two crises are connected. In my understaffed office, we did not have
time to support families in a meaningful way. Instead, we policed them. I
arrived on strangers’ doorsteps, entered their homes (at times without
consent), pointed out what parents were doing wrong, and tried to come
up with what often felt like hollow “band-aid” solutions.
From
a parent’s perspective, meeting with child-protection workers has been
described as similar to being measured against a checklist, with the
correct answers only available to the social worker. This bombardment of
questions included: “Do you drink alcohol?” and “How do you handle
disagreements in your family?”
I rarely had time to
build trust with families before these meetings, and they were often
understandably hesitant, confused, or angry. I felt pressured to use
parents’ anger against them. This anger and frustration was another
check mark on the checklist, one of the reasons they were a potential
risk to their children.
Like most child-protection
social workers in Canada, I am a white woman. So are most of my former
coworkers. The families I worked with during my time at MCFD were
Indigenous, save for about three who were white.
University
of Victoria professor of social work Susan Strega notes that poverty
and race make for a “perfect child-welfare storm”. She explains that if
you have children while being poor or as a person of colour, the state
will likely insert itself in your life.
I expected this systemic racism. Naively, I didn’t expect to be blocked when trying to address it.
Shortly
after I arrived in Fort St. James, three of my fellow social workers
left their positions, leaving four of us behind. Understaffing meant
delays in child placement. There were not enough of us to support
families and build relationships. Until my exit interview, I never heard
my manager address understaffing and what it meant for us.
When
he did acknowledge understaffing, he outlined a vision for the work
that was unfamiliar to me. “Child-protection work” is distinct from
“social work”, he said, and when child-protection workers provide
supportive services, they tend to stray from MCFD’s mandate.
This
was the first I had heard of this. If child protection was being
reduced to policing, I had assumed it was because of forces beyond the
ministry’s control. I never thought it might be intentional.
I
had eight supervisors during the year-and-a-half I was in my position.
Some were cognizant of the ongoing systemic oppression and racism faced
by Indigenous families. Whenever possible, they placed children with
family rather than in foster homes. They avoided removing children
through gathering community members to come up with creative ways to
support a family. They liaised with the First Nations bands and wielded
the violent power of state intervention in families with caution and
understanding, which is especially important in a context of historical
and ongoing mass removal of Indigenous children.
Those
supervisors were acting as social workers. I had other supervisors who
acted more like cops. One told me I needed to be “more confrontational”
in my work with families and blamed Indigenous communities and families
for their own poverty and disenfranchisement. They called for homes to
be searched, and for mandatory drug testing.
So
which is it? Are child-protection social workers meant to support
families or police them? The answer to this question needs to be made
clear to workers and families alike.
It seems
obvious to me that child-welfare structures will be sustainable and
effective if they are localized and built by and for the community.
Communities need the space, resources, and support to rebuild their own
mechanisms for ensuring safety. For some Indigenous communities in B.C.
this has meant a return to tradition.
In the
meantime, while outsiders such as myself continue to fill these roles,
there needs to be a more holistic and family-focussed approach to child
welfare. Only then will we be able to correct the stark
overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the mainstream
child-welfare system.
Therein lies the bind: should
we bother focusing on staffing a system in crisis? Or should we shift
our attention, instead, to building new community-based organizations to
support families?
Either way, management should stop leaving frontline workers in the dark. I say do this soon, before there are none left.
