More than 20,000 await adoption, but most remain wards
of the state
Nobody's children
Seventeen-month-old Brian has waited for adoption in a
Milton foster home since he was three weeks old
Photo: JimRankin/Toronto Star
Bureaucracy is a poor parent but thousands of Canadian
children are raised by no other. They're lost in a forest of faulty agencies and
government neglect, like modern versions of Hansel and Gretel,
desperately needing a home and finding none. Also lost are thousands of couples eager to adopt.
Many search the far side of the world, spending up to $35,000, while
kids wanting parents wait in their own home town.
Torn from their original families by neglect, drug- or
alcohol-fuelled violence, mental illness or sexual abuse, these
youngsters badly need stability provided by new parents. Adoption would
be "like a gift from heaven," says one social worker. But most never
receive that gift. They remain almost invisible to policy makers and the
public.
Eight-year-old Daniel has wanted a home since 1997,
when his mother gave him up but kept his infant sister. Wounded by that
abandonment, Daniel aches for a new family. "Are you here to adopt me?" he beseeches visitors. But
Daniel is considered old for adoption. His mother has a history of
mental problems, and he bears deep emotional scars. Daniel remains
nobody's child. And he's not alone.
"People assume there are no kids needing adoption
— in
fact, there are thousands," says Judy Grove, executive director at the
Adoption Council of Canada. "Nobody pays much attention to them.''
`The truth is that we, as a society — all of us —
simply don't consider children very important. We talk a good game but
we don't think kids are as important as other things, like fixing the
roads.' says Jim Paul Nevins, Ontario Court judge.
It's estimated that more than 20,000 children across
Canada are permanent wards of the state, meaning a bureaucracy is their
legal guardian. But each year only about 1,200 become adopted, giving
them homes. Meanwhile, Canadians adopt about 2,000 children yearly
from outside the country. They go overseas for many reasons. Some crave
babies, and infants are rare among wards of the state. Others assume Third World kids will have fewer
problems than crown wards, since most children adopted through a CAS
have ``special needs''.
But simply being 7 or 8 years old can be enough to
warrant a special needs label. So can being of mixed race, or having a
brother or sister also up for adoption, since a sibling group is harder
to place than a single child. Instead of making that clear and aggressively
recruiting families for Canadian kids, most governments and child
protection agencies stand silently aside as people yearning to be
parents leave the country.
``It's the failure of our child welfare system, more
than any other, that drives them away,'' says Grove.
Canada's provinces and territories all run adoption
differently. Some jurisdictions use a network of local children's aid
societies while others rely on a central government department.
Sometimes there's a confusing mix: Adoption in Halifax is the
responsibility of a CAS but, in Truro, 90 kilometres away, it's done by
the province. No jurisdiction is more fragmented than Ontario, where
adoptions are splintered between 52 children's aid societies and a host
of private agencies. The result is a helter skelter system with huge
differences in service, depending on where you live.
Some cash-strapped CASs have literally closed their
doors to prospective parents. Others warn of waits lasting three years,
or more, before a social worker will check a family to see if it's even
suitable to adopt. No wonder prospective parents are discouraged, Grove
says, adding that agency chaos is just one barrier to adoption. Its
opposite — rigid regulation — poses another.
About 6,100 Ontario children are crown wards, meaning
they've been permanently taken from their birth parents. But most of
these families still have court-ordered access to their kids. And that
access — by law — blocks any chance of a child's adoption. In Ontario, adoption and access simply can't go
together, even when families don't use their right to visit a youngster.
According to provincial statistics, parents don't bother seeing their
child in about a third of cases.
Rather than allowing adoption, plus contact with birth
parents, Ontario's rigid law keeps thousands of crown wards off the
waiting list for a new family. On arriving into care they're shunted
into foster homes where most stay until they ``age out'' of the system
on their 18th birthday. It can make for a rootless childhood, spent
drifting through various foster placements, supervised by shifting
social workers. And many continue drifting long after leaving the child
protection system.
Covenant House staff in Toronto, who run a homeless
shelter and drop-in centre for street kids, estimate that about half the
5,000 young people going through their doors every year have been in
foster care. Government cutbacks aren't to blame, since the
province spends heavily on child protection. It must. Ontario has never
had so many children cared for by the state.
More than 14,200 kids were in the care of a children's
aid society, as of April 1 last year. That's up from about 10,200 in
1996 — a 40 per cent increase in four years. (Most of these children
eventually go home, with the rest becoming crown wards.) It's part of a nationwide trend as agencies put new
stress on child protection. There's less emphasis on keeping families
together and more on whisking kids out of troubled homes. Costs have risen even faster, with Ontario CASs
spending $772 million last year — a 75 per cent increase since 1997. But
barely $7 million of that is earmarked for adoption.
While the province spends freely on bringing kids into
state care, it ignores the other side of the equation: getting them back
out into adoptive homes, says Mark Ewer, executive director of the
Catholic Children's Aid Society of Hamilton-Wentworth.
`There's a public policy vacuum. The light has not
gone on. It's crying for a response.' It wasn't always this way. In the
1970s, Ontario stood at the forefront of adoption in North America, says Mark Ewer, Catholic Children's Aid Society of Hamilton-Wentworth ``Ontario had a good, creative system. Then adoption
seemed to go into the Dark Ages,'' says Sandra Scarth. She was the
province's adoption co-ordinator in the 1980s and describes her stint as
a desperate rearguard action. ``It was very frustrating,'' says Scarth, now a
consultant on the West Coast. ``The system itself has set up barriers.'' As co-ordinator, she tried lifting the barrier posed
by access orders — and failed. ``I fought really hard to get that
removed,'' she says, shaking her head. ``It's sad.''
Scarth can't suppress a peal of laughter when asked if
she'd like to return to supervising Ontario's system. ``Oh no,'' she says. She pauses to gaze out the
window of a waterside restaurant as a seaplane takes off from Victoria's
inner harbour. With a steady drone it plows across the water, kicking up
plumes of spray, before gently rising into a clear sky. ``I've been there,''
she smiles. ``Life is much
nicer now.''
With more children in care than ever before, adoption
has never been so needed, but it doesn't happen as often as in earlier
decades. Thousands of Ontario kids were adopted through
children's aid societies, each year in the 1960s and '70s. That dwindled
to about 500 last year. And the kids, too, are different. Virtually all
have been removed from troubled homes and have suffered family breakdown
and other trauma.
In contrast, decades ago, most adopted children were
newborns given up by unwed mothers. That changed with widespread birth
control, legalized abortion, and society's growing acceptance of young
single moms. Now infant adoption is relatively unusual. And it's rarely
done by a CAS. Private agencies entered the field in 1980, and the
few infant adoptions that do take place are generally handled by these
services, for a fee. Last year, they accounted for another 187
adoptions, almost all newborns.
Lots of children still need adoption, but they're
older, and virtually all are labelled ``special needs''. To many
adoptive parents going overseas, that designation sounds suspiciously
like ``damaged goods,'' says Michael Grand, a University of Guelph
psychologist studying adoption issues. They don't understand that some reasons for a special
needs designation are ``quite minor,'' he says, adding that each child
is unique.
At 17 months, blue-eyed Brian is too young to worry
about his future. But anyone planning to adopt him must consider that
his mother was a teenage drug addict who fed her habit while pregnant.
Raised in a Milton foster home since he was 3 weeks old, Brian has shown
no sign of damage from drug exposure — so far. While playing with oversized building blocks, in the
living room of his temporary home, he playfully clambers into a green
storage tub. Foster parent Debbie Krantz chuckles, describing him as
``perfect'' and ``gorgeous.'' For parents adopting Brian ``it will be
like winning the lottery,'' she says. But until willing parents come forward, Brian remains
nobody's child.
Many kids in CAS care do present a major challenge.
Some have fetal alcohol syndrome, or a physical disability, or
difficulty forming an attachment. Almost all crown wards have suffered the stress of
seeing their family shatter, and many come from backgrounds involving
drug or alcohol abuse by a parent. They can be difficult to raise. But
so can children adopted from abroad.
Dr. Dana Johnson runs the University of Minnesota's
international adoption clinic and is blunt on what to expect from a
foreign orphanage: ``The chance of an institutionalized child being
completely normal on arrival in your home is essentially zero. ``These kids don't come from loving, intact families
with a good standard of living.''
A Mississauga pediatrician with a large practice
seeing children from abroad estimates that 50 per cent, or more, arrive
with an unsuspected medical diagnosis. ``We've seen kids who are truly depressed
— grieving.
They've lost their country and their culture,'' says Dr. Angelo Simone.
Yet, there's a perception that overseas adoptees are
less likely to have special needs than someone stuck in foster care at a
local CAS, says Grand, at the University of Guelph. ``We run off to consider international adoption when
there are children, in similar circumstances, right here in our own
country,'' he says. ``We're turning our backs on these kids.''
The challenge is immense, and it's nation-wide. Every
province and territory needs to do better on adoption, Grand says. But
the system's troubles run deeper than policy gaps, a chaotic structure,
poor planning and lack of money. Attitudes on adoption need changing.
``We have belief systems that are completely out of
date,'' says Robert Fulton, a Toronto social work consultant who advises
children's aid societies and the province. ``Picture a kid in foster care,'' Fulton says, tracing
a child's outline in the air. ``He has an access order with his mom and
she uses it, maybe every six months, to see the kid. He's eight years
old and has been in and out of five foster homes. The mother's a decent
sort, she tries her best, but she's all screwed up. She's attached to
the kid, he really likes her, but he couldn't live with her. ``That, they say, is the profile of a kid who cannot
be adopted. For several reasons: Number one, the kid's seeing the
mother, therefore he will never attach to an adoptive family. That is
not true. Two, the kid has had five caretakers, therefore he could never
bond again. Not true. The kid is eight — too old — nobody wants him. Not
true, not true, not true. ``I can prove it,'' Fulton says, patting a stack of
scientific papers on the table in front of him. ``That profile is really
a typical profile of a crown ward in Ontario. And those beliefs are the
major barrier to adoption.''
Traditionally, it was thought that only very young
children could form a bond, or ``attach,'' to a new parent. In this
view, older kids are considered virtually unadoptable, so their best
option is to remain in foster care.
The idea that only very young children can form a bond
is 'a zombie — it's dead but it lives on. It's been debunked, but it
still prevents people from making the right decision. It dominates not
just social workers but psychologists, judges, and — unfortunately — the
community at large.'
As if the system weren't fragmented enough, an
ideological gap yawns between the social workers who handle adoption and
``frontline'' counterparts, whose job is to enter troubled homes and
take kids out.
Frontline workers tend to be young, inexperienced, and
indifferent to adoption, says Scarth. They only see adopted kids when a
placement has broken down and the children are back in care. ``They
don't see adoptions that succeed.'' Harried child protection staff
concentrate on getting kids into safe foster homes and often look no
further. It
happens right across the country.''
``I remember being in child protection,'' says Cheryl
Fix, manager of British Columbia's adoption department. ``I never gave a
thought about whether a child was adoptable, or moving them on to
adoption. I just worried about making sure they didn't go back home. ``You didn't really think long-term.'' Fix is trying to change that with new training for
frontline workers. ``In child protection, you only see one side of it —
the side that's broken down. You also need to see stuff that works.''
Adoption ``works'' by giving children a secure base in
life, something especially important to those in care who are ``up to
their neck in risk factors,'' says Fulton. ``With a secure attachment
you can walk through hell and back.''
Good foster care can provide a firm base, he says, but
a foster child remains much more at risk of being set adrift than the
same kid adopted by the same family.
Adoption is a lifelong commitment while foster
parenting is like a job. People retire, or leave for other employment
opportunities. Marital problems and divorce can end fostering. And
people quit for health reasons. Then their foster kids are scattered.
More than a third of Ontario's crown wards have been
through three or more foster homes, according to a 1999 review examining
a large cross-section of these children. And 43 per cent have had three
or more case workers. Often they were put in foster care and then sent
back home, to their birth families, only to wind up in a different
foster home a few months later. Even the best foster care ends when kids ``age out''
of the system. ``Then what are you?'' asks Fulton, shrugging his
shoulders. ``Whereas, if you're adopted, you're adopted for life.''
It isn't for everyone, he adds. Some children can't
attach to a new family — those sharing a deep and secure bond with their
birth mom have particular difficulty. ``But the vast majority of crown
wards can be successfully adopted.''
Daniel's case is more difficult than most. His
bitterness runs deep after being abandoned in favour of a younger
sibling. And there's a risk he'll lash out at smaller kids.
That's why he's at Woodview Children's Centre, in Burlington, rather
than in foster care. But finding the right adoptive parent could be his
salvation, says Doug Jackson, a youth worker at the centre where
children learn anger management. Other youngsters here are older than
Daniel and he hasn't had any incidents. ``He's a delightful child. Charming. Very
affectionate. He wants to please,'' Jackson says. As if to illustrate that point, the 8-year-old brags
about the chores he does around the centre. ``I vacuumed my room, I cleaned the stairs, I did the
staff room, and I did the garbage outside,'' he beams. The ideal adoptive home would be one where Daniel is
an only child, with parents able to give him a great deal of attention
and set firm limits, says Jackson.
Daniel has suffered a huge loss, and that can cause
problems, he says. ``But I've been doing this for 25 years and I feel
he's got a lot of potential. He tries. I think there's hope.'' Stakes are high. Daniel remains a child at risk. ``I
don't think he'd survive — emotionally — an adoption breakdown,'' frowns
social worker Ann Marie Keyes. Daniel is ``a victim of the system,'' she says. If he
had been made available for adoption sooner, at a younger age, he would
have had better odds of finding the right adoptive home. ``But it took too long. His case kept getting delayed
and delayed,'' Keyes says. ``It's sad.''
Ontario took a step toward quickening the adoption
process in April, last year, when it imposed a detailed timetable on
child protection cases. Meant to speed children's cases through the courts, it
set a one-year limit for a child under 6 to be in temporary CAS care. It
also set an even tougher deadline: once a kid is taken from home by an
agency, the system has a maximum of 120 days to complete a child
protection hearing.
The deadlines are supposed to make kids, like Daniel,
quickly available for adoption by cutting through legal tangles and
forcing a rapid decision. But, even in this, the province has stumbled.
Nothing happens when deadlines aren't met, and children remain in legal
limbo.
``The courts are backlogged,'' says Marv Bernstein,
lawyer for the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies. ``There
aren't enough judges, there are procedural rules, there's a plethora of
paper.''
``You could convict a murderer — or two — in the
length of time we spend on a crown wardship trial,'' growls Ewer, at
Hamilton's Catholic CAS. His agency, for example, took a baby into care in
August, 2000. A trial date had been set for next month, almost a year
beyond the 120-day deadline for a completed hearing. ``And I don't know
if that trial will go ahead. It can adjourn for various reasons,'' Ewer
says. ``The longer these kids' lives are in limbo the worse
it is,'' he says, leaning back and spreading his arms wide. ``How long
can they wait?''
Ontario Court Justice Penny Jones says meeting the
deadline ``is pretty impossible'' if birth parents decide to fight crown
wardship. ``The parents have to organize themselves, they have to
organize their Legal Aid. There are many months that are lost.''
The ``culture of the courts'' is slanted toward delays
and compromise, says Ewer. ``Some of it serves the interests of parents
— maybe even lawyers, who are funded through the (Legal Aid) system — to
the detriment of kids.''
Parents' and lawyers' concerns aren't supposed to
matter. The legislation clearly states that the timetable can only be
extended ``if the best interests of the child require it.'' Despite that, judges do take into account the rights
of a birth parent, says Ontario Court Justice Lloyd Budgell. ``I think they have to,'' says Budgell, designated
spokesperson for Chief Justice Brian Lennox, of the Ontario Court of
Justice. ``You don't want to run roughshod over anyone. ``If you just took the case and followed it through —
bang, bang, bang — I suppose you could force people to do certain
things. I'm not sure it would be better.'' The deadline set out in the legislation ``is just not
realistic,'' he says.
``I don't care where you go, Kenora or downtown
Toronto — anywhere — you won't find a family court that can get all
these cases through in that certain amount of time,'' agrees Ontario
Court Judge Jim Paul Nevins. ``You can't do it.'' The system doesn't have enough judges, and the
government doesn't want to pay for more, he says. But that's just part
of a bigger problem. ``It's also a question of children's aid staff and
other resources,'' Nevins says. ``The truth is that we, as a society — all of us
—
simply don't consider children very important.
``We talk a good game but we don't think kids are as
important as other things, like fixing the roads.''
By Leslie Papp, Tanya Talaga and Jim Rankin
23 June 2003
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_=10d7cf57cbe58adb&pagename=thestar/
Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1001714525960&call_page=TS_Unsolved_Shootings&call_pageid=996748068058&call_pagepath=GTA/Crime/UnsolvedShootings&col=996748067778
home
|