Report casts light on systemic issues with Child Intervention Services

The suicide death of a teenage Métis boy in kinship care is a “tragedy” that spurred the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate to issue six recommendations to the Ministry of Human Services.
“A mother’s lost her son, a family’s lost a loved one and we looked at that (and) we were quite concerned about what are those systemic issues that are related to this situation? How can we learn from this tragedy so we can try and prevent it from happening again?” said Del Graff, provincial Child and Youth Advocate.

The full investigative review was the result of a preliminary investigative report that indicated a closer look at the boy’s situation would be beneficial in identifying potential systemic issues.

Graff’s review, which was released in early July, calls attention to the challenges involved in kinship care, the government’s preferred method in placing children who are apprehended. Nearly one-quarter of children (23 per cent) who are taken from their family homes are placed in kinship care.

“It’s complicated because kinship caregivers have relationships with the parents of the children that they’re caring for and in that regard, in our view, it can be more complex as opposed to less complex than a foster care situation,” said Graff.

The boy, dubbed Brian in the report, hanged himself in 2012 at the age of 16 while in the care of his aunt. The eldest in his family, Brian had been receiving attention from Alberta Human Services sporadically since he was three years old, because of drug use by his mother and violence within the home. His siblings had also been in and out of kinship care, particularly with their grandmother.

Two recommendations called for kinship care providers to receive “specialized training and support plans which are both tailored to meet their individual and unique needs” and for intervention workers to receive specialized training to provide them with the “competencies required to manage the unique situations presented by kinship care arrangements.”

Graff would not say if Brian’s situation would have been different if the boy had been placed in foster care and not kinship care.
“I don’t know that at all and that would be highly speculative. What we do know about kinship care is that it is a preferred way of placing children because they are with people they know, who they have some level of connection prior to the placement…. They would be much more comfortable going to a grandparent than going to a stranger in a foster care situation,” said Graff.

He is adamant that the review is not about casting blame, but the 44-page report, entitled “Remembering Brian,” is blatant not only in regards to gaps in government services, but to policies and guidelines already in place that are both unclear and difficult to follow.

“What our report suggested is that …the process reflected in the policy isn’t clear enough for regions to know exactly what to do and so there would be process confusion around the transfer of services between regions …and this population is a population that when there are children in care, they can be quite mobile in terms of moving around. So the importance of that policy being accurate and able to reflect the practise demand for a streamlined transfer is critical,” said Graff.

The report also takes aim at the imbalance in dealing with children and family issues.

“If a family comes to the attention of the ministry for a particular presenting problem, it can’t just be that presenting problem. Often that presenting problem is related to parental behaviour but that can’t be the only way the ministry looks at the circumstance. They also have to look at the impact on the children of those parental behaviours,” said Graff. “What we pointed out in our report is here is a circumstance where this imbalance was present.”

The first recommendation calls for Child Intervention Services to “engage in comprehensive assessments to ensure a balance is struck between child-focused and family-centred approaches.”
Alberta Human Services has received OCYA’s report.

“We are carefully reviewing the report and its recommendations. We will be providing a detailed response to the advocate and that response will be available to the public,” said Roxanne Dube Coelho, spokesperson for the department.

No date has been set as to when that response will be delivered.