Friday, January 25, 2002

Splitting up a family was a dirty business

By Dave Brown
The Ottawa Citizen

Pity the poor child protection workers. A Toronto inquest has them on the hot seat for failing to take seven-year-old Randal Dooley out of an allegedly abusive and eventually fatal home situation.

In this corner, they're under fire for going too far the other way and taking several children out of a home in Ottawa in the summer of 2000, although abuse was never an issue.

When it happened, the parents called this desk to complain about Children's Aid Society actions. They said the children were removed because the home was too dirty. They didn't hesitate to say the home was out of control dirt-wise. I went for a look. It was bad. It was too big a job for a vacuum. A shovel would have been needed.

Money shortage wasn't the problem. It's a high-income family. They had too many kids for the size of the house and decided to buy another one. So they stopped cleaning, thinking they were about to move. Things got so far ahead of them they had no hope of catching up, and somebody alerted the CAS.

It's a very large family and giving the exact number of children could identify them. That's against the law, so let's say authorities apprehended more than six and less than 12 children, and placed them in foster homes.

To get them back, the parents had to rebuild their lives. They spent the next year and a half running themselves ragged finding a new home that would satisfy child protectors.

They had to pay a psychologist $10,000 to give them mental OK stickers to satisfy a court. While making trips to court, they also had to travel by bus several times a week to CAS headquarters in the east end to calm their children.

The children were scattered through several foster homes. What most concerned the parents was that their two-year-old was dependent on their 14-year-old. The older child was the baby's security, and they begged the protectors to keep them together. They didn't, and the baby is still being treated for the trauma caused by that separation.

Eventually they found a new home, decorated it to the satisfaction of protection workers, and the children were reintroduced into the family by ones and twos. All the while, the father kept an open diary of events. It was open in the sense he e-mailed each entry, and I was on his list.

Getting a husband and wife to agree on what house to buy is tough enough. But these people had to get caseworkers to agree. Some of the expectations of some of those workers showed they knew little about major purchases.

With the children in state care, caseworkers were kept busy dabbling in affairs at schools and doctors' offices, arranging visits, counselling, and doing what they are paid to do. They focused on the children. The parents believed things could be brought to a quicker end and their frightened children returned sooner if the focus was on the family as a whole.

While in government custody, one of the children gave a letter to the parents, asking them to get it published in a newspaper. It found its way to this desk but was filed, waiting for a conclusion to the family's problems.

It was dated three months after the apprehensions. "I was tooken from my home along with my brothers and sisters ... from our parents who love us and care for us."

That the children lived in a mess that bordered on filthy meant little to them. They were well fed and surrounded by a boisterous and happy tumble of siblings. The letter gave a rare glimpse of a child's feelings when authority steps in.

"They give us paper and markers to draw and I go up to my room with tears in my eyes because I know they will make me leave. I come outside and I'm calm. Then I start crying and (a caseworker) asks me why. I try to tell her how much we need our parents and how much they need us. She was pretending to listen but I could tell she really wasn't. Then she tried to tell me I'll be better off where I'm going to be living. So then they told us to get in the car."

The letter describes how the foster parents would fight; something the children hadn't experienced in their family home. The open anger was a new experience and made sleep difficult. In the end, a study of the real parents would show they were loving and caring, but lousy housekeepers. That has been changed because they know they're being watched.

The parents say their children were traumatized by a system that is hidebound by its own rules. It took all the programmed steps and ran up a fortune in costs to the family and the system, through foster care and caseworker hours. They believe all would have been better served, including taxpayers, if the family had been kept together.

Mother was treated for anxiety and depression but seems better now that her family is together.

She has a question: "Wouldn't it have been cheaper to send in housecleaners?"

*Dave Brown is the Citizen's senior editor. Send e-mail to dbrown@thecitizen.southam.ca Read previous columns at www.ottawacitizen.com .