Quebec researchers and civil rights advocates are slamming provincial child welfare and government authorities for failing to collect data needed to properly assess discrepancies in the child protection sphere.
A recent study suggesting that more Black children in Canada are placed in foster care than white ones does not include Quebec because of hard-to-obtain data.
Alicia Boatswain-Kyte, assistant professor at McGill University’s School of Social Work, led a recent study that analyzed national reported child abuse and neglect data.
“What we found is that when we compared Black children to white children, apples to apples, that we were still finding that being Black resulted in being more likely to be placed out of home care — a little more than twice the frequency of white children,” she told Global News.
The findings match what Boatswain-Kyte and others, including civil rights advocates, have heard anecdotally for years.
“This study can provide further quantitative as well as qualitative confirmation, first that there’s an overrepresentation of Black youth in the child protection system, and second that racial bias is a major factor,” Fo Niemi, executive director of the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR), said.
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Boatswain-Kyte explained that she did not include Quebec data in her findings partly because some of the information required from the province isn’t easy to get — like race-based data.
“The race-based studies that have been done in Quebec have been done by researchers who have an interest,” she noted, “but there’s no data that’s actually being generated by the institutions themselves that’s made publicly available.”
So, completing a similar study in Quebec would take more time, which she plans to do, she added.
“We’re pretty certain that we’ll have similar findings given that the data looks the same and that we’re already finding racial disparity,” she noted. “But it’s still an analysis that we have to do.”
Sharon Nelson, president of the Jamaica Association of Montreal, is concerned and cautioned that racial bias, which leads to the disparity, creates mistrust.
She believes both provincial and federal governments should treat it as a health issue.
“Because you’re talking about trauma of children and families themselves,” she said. “I think this issue cannot just stay as a research report and I’m sure the researchers are not going to keep it that way. There’s a traumatization of a group of people — families and children — in our country.”
Niemi added that in Quebec there’s not enough accountability, arguing that “we have to do away with the immunity that is granted to the youth protection system — the youth protection directors, the youth protection staff who may deliberately make a biased decision.”
Boatswain-Kyte also says there needs to be more government partnerships with community organizations that better understand the lived experiences of the families.
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