There exists, here in Ontario, a government agency with the power to enter your home with armed backup and crush your life into powder. These people can do this with no evidence and no court order. They have absolute authority to ruin your life, and if they decide you’ve done something wrong they don’t even have to prove it. You have to prove you didn’t.
No. I am not talking about anti-terror organizations. I’m talking about child welfare agencies.
The child protection agencies here have a difficult job. They have to protect our most vulnerable citizens from the most evil. And for decades, this was an almost impossible task. Victims wouldn’t talk. Abusers used fear and terror to keep things under a tight lid. Communities closed ranks around their priests, their coaches, their teachers, and Nobody Dared Talk About It.
So the laws governing child protection were radically rewritten to give investigators vast new powers. Unfortunately, by choosing to err on the side of caution the laws make it easy for innocent families to be disrupted, sometimes for good.
Consider this: a 22-year-old graduate of a two-year community college social work program can be given the power to come to your home and take your children. All this person needs is a report of abuse, true or not, and you could have a social worker with armed police at your door, ready to take your child to live with strangers in foster care.
The worst is this: they don’t have to prove it. In a complete reversal of “innocent until proven guilty,” it would be up to you to prove to them that you did not abuse your child.
It could be months before you get your children back, if at all, and it could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
This happens. In my line of work I hear frequent stories of children taken away because of a dispute with an ex, or an angry neighbour, or a landlord who wants back rent. The general idea is that by giving these child protection workers this much power, they’ll be sure to protect as many kids as possible. And if a few innocent families are affected? Well, it’s part of the process.
Screw that.
That’s just wrong. It’s foul.
I spent a lot of years reporting on the courts. There’s one mantra that defence lawyers repeated over and over during sentencing: “My client grew up in foster care.”
Exposing small children to the chaos and uncertainty of separation from their families, based only on a smattering of fact, is wrong.
But these workers have no choice. The laws is clear: all reports have to be taken seriously.
How seriously? Consider this nugget of stupidity, from a Canadian Press article a few weeks back:
A mother from Barrie, Ont., is demanding an apology after child protection workers launched an investigation into sexual abuse allegations that came from a psychic.
The woman says her daughter Victoria’s teaching assistant visited a psychic who asked if she taught a girl whose name started with the letter “V.”
The psychic then went on to tell her that the 11-year-old, who is autistic and non-verbal, was being abused by a young man. The assistant told school officials who in turn called in child welfare workers.
Under the law, anyone who works with children and has reasonable grounds to suspect a youngster is being harmed must report it immediately – and workers have an obligation to follow up.
Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve heard today?
It took thousands of years for modern society to build and evolve a set of laws to govern ourselves. And while they vary from country to country, most westernized nations tend to follow the same general principles. And chief among them is burden of proof.
It’s sad that these laws in Ontario kick that concept to the curb and have the potential to give one person absolute power to ignore onus and rule of evidence.
I favour tougher laws for people who hurt children. I think pedophiles should be jailed for life and neutered on their first offence. I think child-beaters should be sent naked into general pop in the toughest prisons in the land with “I Beat My Child” tattooed on their foreheads. I think there should be no house arrest, or probation, or second chances for anyone who hurts a child.
But what rankles me almost as much as that is the idea that good, innocent parents can be railroaded by a flawed system, and the children pay the price.
Because when that happens, it’s the system that has carried out the very abuse it aims to stop.
That’s beyond stupid. And you don’t have to be a psychic to see it.
