CALGARY
Troubled moms get support
The province has approved a ground-breaking restorative justice program designed to help vulnerable and troubled young mothers who land in court.
Just-Us Girls is a grassroots initiative that will help mothers between the ages of 12 and 24 who have committed crimes or who have had their children apprehended by Children's Services. It is the first gender-specific youth justice committee in North America and a homegrown experiment in the power of mentorship. The program will bring strong female community volunteers together with troubled young mothers who desperately need the support of stable, caring women while they put their lives and families back together.
"Our role is to give the young mom a voice in the system," says Danielle Collins, a family resource facilitator with Edmonton's Family Law Office. She co-founded the program with youth court worker Mark Cherrington.
On July 3, Alberta's Solicitor General announced $1,000 in seed funding for the initiative, which has become the 126th Alberta youth justice committee to be sanctioned under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
The young mothers who will be served by the program are among the most vulnerable of those who come before the courts, Collins says. They may come from communities plagued by violence and poverty or from families struggling with unemployment, mental illness and parental incarceration. Perhaps they have been victims of family violence, swept up in a gang culture or become addicted to drugs. Whether it is a youth criminal charge or child apprehension that brings them to court, the decisions they make there have profound consequences not only for themselves, but for their young families as well. They are ill-equipped to make those decisions, Collins says.
Many of the young mothers grew up in foster care themselves and they fight the system even if it's not in the best interest of their children, she says. They blow up at case workers, they rebel against the court, they balk at plans designed to help them. Collins believes one reason the young women resist is because they don't have any say in the process: they are told where they have to be, what they have to do, who they have to talk to. In addition, they don't understand the child-welfare system and they never take the opportunity to provide their side of the story, so the information before the court is almost always limited to information provided by Children's Services. Just-Us Girls will change that.
"The bottom line is we want to help them take control of their lives," Collins says. "When the scales of justice are balanced, there will be more on her side of the scale."
The program will divert young women out of the system for a two-hour "sharing circle" during which three female volunteers from the community will listen to her side of the story and discuss what she would like to see happen in the future. The volunteers will encourage healthy communication with caseworkers and provide information and options to support the young mother. When the circle is over, the chairwoman will write a report for the judge.
The report will tell the young mother's own story, explain her dreams and aspirations, provide information about her support system, her relationship with the father of her children, her criminal history and mental-health issues. Most importantly, though, it will outline the young mother's plan for her own rehabilitation, counselling and programming. Perhaps she wants to attend parenting classes, or Alcoholics Anonymous, or perhaps she has a certain psychologist she trusts. If she has committed a crime, she will map out a concrete, achievable action that will repair the harm caused by the offence.
The Just-Us Girls report will allow the young mother to advocate for herself and, in the months that follow, she has a mentor to call for support.
Co-founder Cherrington says the program will also help break down barriers and increase the community's understanding of troubled young mothers. "We need to have the healthy community involved with these girls. Positive female community members can actively mentor and assist these mothers. For many girls it will be the first glimpse of what a healthy community, a healthy family, looks like."
Giselle Rosario is a criminologist who is married to Cherrington and is volunteering with Just-Us Girls because she believes the program will make a difference. "If you had to pick a group where you will have a big impact, it would be with young mothers," Rosario says. "When you're dealing with a young woman with kids, you're not only changing that woman's life,(but also)the life of her partner and the lives of her children."
Rosario says the program's strength comes from the "power of one. "It takes just one interested person – a teacher, a friend, a mentor – to change a young woman's life."
Karen Kleiss
2 September 2009
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Troubled+moms+support/1952684/story.html
