The top Aboriginal leader in Manitoba is calling for a First Nations children’s advocate to help prevent incidents like the recent violent beating of a 15-year-old girl housed in a hotel.
Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Derek Nepinak says the provincial child welfare system run by Child and Family Services is “creating more victims” than it is helping, so it’s time for Aboriginal oversight.
The province already has a children’s advocate whose job is to give an independent voice to children in the CFS system, but not an Aboriginal-specific advocate.
Nepinak’s comments come the same week CTV News revealed that Manitoba’s CFS had been increasingly housing vulnerable children in hotels, despite long promising to end the practice. On one day last March, 81 children were sheltered in hotels.
A 15-year-old Aboriginal girl told CTV News earlier this week that life in provincial care – including moving in and out of hotels with little supervision – led her to the sex trade at age 12.
Meanwhile, two Aboriginal sisters say they cut themselves to deal with the pain of having been molested in care after being taken from alcoholic parents.
Tina Fontaine, the 15-year-old Aboriginal girl found dead in the Red River last August after running away from a new foster home, had also been previously sheltered in a hotel.
In response to pressure from opposition parties, the province said this week it would completely stop the practice of housing kids in hotels by June 1, and hire more social workers.
In Manitoba, 90 per cent of kids in care are Aboriginal compared to 53 per cent in B.C. and 18 per cent in Ontario.
On a per capita basis, Manitoba has a larger challenge than other provinces. The province has 10,000 children in its care. Ontario, a province with nearly 11 times the population, has only one-and-a-half times as many in care. British Columbia, with nearly four times Manitoba’s size, has fewer, at 8,000.
But there is hope.
Former University of Manitoba football player Julian Hardy says he has room for three more foster children in a house he bought and outfitted with four beds so that he could get kids out of hotels.
Hardy says he made the decision to help after living in a hotel, seeing vulnerable Aboriginal youth there, and wondering, “Why aren’t there places they can go that are safe?”
With a report from CTV’s Manitoba Bureau Chief Jill Macyshon
