A scathing report outlining how Manitoba government agencies failed to help 15-year-old Tina Fontaine in the weeks before her death isn’t surprising to Indigenous child advocates.
Indigenous people and their children often feel like they’re “just pushed aside,” Mama Bear Clan member Samantha Chief told CTV News Channel. She said Indigenous youths being neglected by government services was a part of their “day-to-day lives of not being recognized when we cry out for help.”
“She was a human being [who] deserved respect that she didn’t get,” said Chief, whose women-led, volunteer group patrols Winnipeg streets helping at-risk youth.
Children’s advocate Daphne Penrose says in her report that the province systematically failed Fontaine. It found that the girl had reached out for help multiple times to different agencies in the weeks before she was found dead in a river in August 2014.
Manitoba's Child Advocate's 115-page report found that Fontaine was essentially left homeless and was at risk for sexual exploitation. The report also makes five recommendations which include a plan to address children's mental health and a new response for at-risk and sexually exploited youth.
But Chief is skeptical, saying past plans have been “ego-led” and hadn’t come “from the heart.” She says she prays “every day that someone is going to come in and [take] all the wrongs and make them right somehow.”
“I’m still in awe of all these talks and all these things that are happening [which] aren’t doing anything to benefit the children here,” Chief said, adding that Child and Family Services had failed her too as a child.
Without mentioning specific programs, she criticized their lack of funding, as well as the temporary nature of other programs -- which Chief described as “quick Band-Aids.”
When people are “down in their lowest point,” Chief says that’s when it’s vital that services “come from a place of love and compassion.”
'Groups need to act in unison'
In an interview on CTV’s “Power Play,” Cindy Blackstock, executive director of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, stressed that the welfare of Indigenous children goes beyond just a “group of people in an office.”
“It’s the people in the schools, it’s the mental health workers … the medical doctors, it’s police services and it’s child welfare services -- all of those groups need to act in unison,” she said. “Canada has not gone the distance in terms of really prioritizing children’s care.”
The new report urged schools to reform suspension and expulsion policies for at-risk youths and Blackstock said school administrators can’t ignore when an Indigenous youth goes days missing school.
“There needs to be a better alarm system to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on with this kid?” she said.
“How can we intervene with other service providers to make sure that something isn’t happening to [girls] -- as what was happening to Tina [who] was being sexually exploited by predator after predator,” Blackstock said.
'Help needs to be there, right now'
According to the new report, one of the more damning instances of neglect included how, despite Fontaine’s father being brutally murdered when she was 12, she didn’t receive any grief counselling.
“Canada seems to be pretty lackluster when it comes to some of the most basic things that you think would be in place for a child who’s experienced that kind of trauma in her life,” Blackstock said.
“That help needs to be there, right now,” she said. “It’s not like ‘make an appointment six, eight weeks done the line.’ We need to have real interventions that are available to youth at risk right at the moment.”
She echoed the thoughts of Penrose, who told reporters, “We have to make sure [youth] have access to timely treatment.”
“And when they come in and they say they’re ready, we need to be able to say, ‘Come with me. I’ve got you.’ And right now, we can’t say that,” she said in Powerview-Pine falls, Man.
"We have to also acknowledge the many other ... children and youth who are falling through the cracks of society's safety net just like Tina," she said.
Penrose said the government needs to act quickly because children and youth are still facing the same risks and getting the same responses.
With files from The Canadian Press
