Real Child Abuse

September 29, 2010 permalink

While fixcas rarely pays attention to the details of legal argumentation in judicial opinions, here is one worth reading. The case is titled Children’s Aid Society of Waterloo Region v. R.(K.), 2009 ONCJ 684 available on the web at link.

The girl is named only as Ms K R, born on August 14, 1994. She came into CAS care at age 5 and became a crown ward in May 2001. Over a three year period there are 34 reports on her by the Waterloo Regional Police Service. Paragraph 7 of judge Margaret A McSorley's opinion is a list of 23 incidents of misbehavior by the girl. To keep her under control, she was diagnosed with mental disorders, put in 12-14 placements (they don't seem to know exactly), apprehended 30 times, restrained, formed (shrink slang for making an application) under the Mental Health Act eleven times, arrested ten times, criminally charged and convicted, confined to secure treatment and tasered. In a custom remodeled home the furniture was secured, the windows were replaced with plexiglass, a lock was placed on the kitchen door, a large fence was built around the property and a secure isolation room was built specifically for Ms K R. CAS called this: remodeling a home to meet Ms K R’s needs. Her social worker, Ms Vey-Formica, blames K R's problems on her treatment before entering foster care, though she says the girl's behavior worsened.

What's wrong with this treatment plan? In ten years there is nothing in the record to show that anyone committed an act of kindness toward the girl. Years of endless nastiness is not at all unusual for children who have spent serious time in foster care, and accounts for the large number of foster children who graduate to become dysfunctional adults.

Chris Carter says of Ms K R:

I believe that I may have met this female teenager at the Cambridge Courthouse on a couple of occasions in 2008/2009.

She was being escorted through the Cambridge courthouse by two or three female CAS (group home?) staff; they had [her] in one of those restraining belts with her hands cuffed in the front to the belt.

I remember that she spoke to me and said: "Chris Carter, fixcas.com, the Ellis family."

I asked her name but they quickly took her away before she could tell me.

I didn't know anything about her but I remember being impressed by the defiance she had towards her situation.

So some advocacy work is getting through to the people most affected by CAS - the foster children. For Ms K R and any other current or former foster children reading, you are the people this website is about.