TOPICS

 

Series: The Child Welfare Industry

Program: APTN InFocus – Melissa Ridgen and Beverly Andrews

 

 

Most Canadians understand the residential schools and the 60s Scoop were horrible tools of assimilation that devastated Indigenous families and caused intergenerational trauma that is still felt today.

What many do not understand is that the forced removal of Indigenous kids from their families, continues to happen today in Canada at an alarming rate.

Critics call it the Millennium Scoop – government-sponsored apprehension of Indigenous children through child welfare systems, breaking up families, often with little to no evidence that they were at risk of abuse or neglect.

Indigenous children represent 52% of children in foster care in Canada, yet account for less than 8% of the child population. This overrepresentation is even worse in some jurisdictions, like Manitoba which has close to 11,000 children in care most years, 90% of whom are Indigenous.

The business of seizing and warehousing children is big business in Canada, with tens of thousands of jobs across the country, dependent on children being in care. While the system portrays itself as working in the best interest of children and families, too many people have stories that suggest that is not the case. The Truth and reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls both cited child welfare as an out-of-control problem that must be addressed if Canada and its provinces are to move forward on the path of reconciliation.

Yet this a human rights atrocity seems to not be understood by those not directly affected by the system. Producers Melissa Ridgen and Beverly Andrews aimed to change that.

APTN InFocus is a one-hour live current affairs call-in show that airs every Wednesday afternoon on APTN. Ridgen and Andrews decided 2019 would be the year to be relentless in finding people to share personal stories of how they’ve been victimized by this system, exposing how the industry undermines Indigenous children and families to keep itself in business, and seeking accountability from those who have the power to affect change.
 

We began with a three-part series on child, which aired Jan 23, Jan 30 and Feb 6 2019.

 

INFOCUS

Part 1

A children’s advocate and former case worker reveal how Indigenous families are targeted. Watch here

INFOCUS

Part 2

Indigenous mothers share how their children were taken with no evidence and the hoops they had to jump through to get them back – one with $1500 worth of gift cards from the agency that wrongly took her children. Watch here

INFOCUS

Part 3

Children who aged out of foster care share their perspective of the dysfunction from the inside, a former case worker who was fired for working against the system to keep families together, and a social worker who developed a program to protect Indigenous mothers and their newborns who’d be targeted by child welfare authorities. Watch here


 

That three-part series was just the beginning of an entire year of coverage of this the child welfare problem.

 

CFS-INFOUCS-FAMILY

May 24, 2019

In May 2019 APTN InFocus shared the story of a Winnipeg couple who spent $200,000 and 10 months fighting the CFS system to get their infant son back, who’d been wrongly taken based on racial profiling by a doctor. Watch here

WILLIAMS-LAKE-APPREHENSION

June 20, 2019

Then in June 2019, APTN broke the story of Baby H who was seized from a B.C. hospital after staff called child welfare authorities to complain a mom was neglecting her baby 90–minutes after coming out of a C-section. This story was one of APTN’s widest-shared story of 2019, receiving over 500,000 pageviews on aptnnews.ca. Watch here

BABY-H-PHOTO

September 17, 2019

Persistent coverage of the Baby H matter by the APTN InFocus team over the summer of 2019, put pressure on the B.C. government to act. In September, it was the first jurisdiction in Canada to end the practice of apprehending newborns – a practice known as birth alerts. Watch here

INFOCUS

October 9, 2019

In October 2019, APTN InFocus kicked off a fresh season with the story of a Brandon, MB couple whose infant son was taken from hospital because the mother had been in an abusive relationship with another man six years previously. Watch here

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December 12, 2019

The APTN InFocus team wrapped up 2019 with an exclusive report that Manitoba – the worst jurisdiction in Canada for apprehending children – was changing the way it handles child welfare. The result – fewer apprehensions. This was done through changing the way agencies are funded to de-incentivize seizing children from their families. Watch here


 

In all, 16 hours of airtime on APTN InFocus was dedicated to exposing the human rights abuses of the child welfare system in 2019.