We spend a lot of time tearing down the child welfare system while talking to parents who are caught up in the seemingly never-ending cycle of state control of their children.
We’ve talked to foster parents frustrated by what they see in the system and occasionally hear from workers who left the social work profession because of what they’ve witnessed.
On the latest edition of InFocus, we hear from two social workers in Manitoba who penned the book Child and Family Dis-services: Objective perspective inside the system.
Kareen Thompson and Cynthia Eyeshemitan say the colonial system of child welfare has inflicted harm disproportionately on Indigenous families and they believe communities taking back control of child welfare under C-92 is an essential first step in restoring the notion that it takes a village to raise a child – a village that child belongs to – not stolen from.
Also on the show, we get an update from a Manitoba family who battled an Indigenous child welfare agency to have a judge order their infant son be returned to them – only to learn that while embroiled in that legal case, the mother’s oldest daughter was quietly given up for adoption by the province.
