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Listen to thisToronto: Why are so many black
children
in foster and group homes?
A disproportionate number of Toronto-area children in foster and group-home care are black. Advocates are blaming poverty, cultural misunderstanding and racism.
In the Toronto area, black children are being taken from their families and placed into foster and group-home care at much higher rates than white children. Numbers obtained by the Star indicate that 41 per cent of the children and youth in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto are black. Yet only 8.2 per cent of Toronto’s population under the age of 18 is black.
By contrast, 37 per cent of kids in the care of the Toronto CAS are white, at a time when more than half of the city’s population under the age of 18 is white. Other figures obtained by the Star indicate the overrepresentation is provincewide.
“The gross overrepresentation of black kids in the CAS is like a modern-day residential schools system,” says Margaret Parsons, executive director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, which advocates on behalf of the province’s 590,000 black residents.
“This is another form of racial profiling,” she says. “They’re profiling black parents in a very negative way.”
Patricia knows first-hand how cultural misunderstandings can lead to black children being removed from their homes. She was shocked when police and a Toronto children’s aid worker came to her tidy bungalow two years ago to say her granddaughters were being taken into care.
Patricia, whose name has been changed to protect the identity of her grandchildren, had been caring for the girls for about a decade, following the death of their mother in Jamaica. They were living a comfortable life in Toronto. “For the little one, I was the only mother she ever knew,” says the soft-spoken woman.
That all changed in 2012. Her teenage granddaughter, facing suspension at school, told the principal she would be beaten with a baseball bat if her grandmother found out.
“She told them I was going to kill her,” says Patricia, who admits she disciplined her granddaughters with a slap now and then, but denies ever having struck the girls with an object.
“West Indian children, if something is going to happen, they say: ‘Oh my mother is going to kill me.’ It’s not that her mother is going to kill her. That’s how they speak,” Patricia insists.
Patricia was charged with numerous counts of assault with a weapon, involving multiple incidents. A landed immigrant, she says she was advised by her legal aid lawyer to plead guilty to some charges to avoid possible deportation. In a blur, she agreed.
As a result of her criminal record, she lost her job as a caregiver for the elderly. Unable to pay the mortgage, she lost her home. And her granddaughters.
“Everything fell apart,” she says.
