At the Intersection of Race, Religion, and Child Protection

I am a racialized woman. I am Muslim. I am a child welfare worker. How do I, as a member of the BIPOC community and someone whose epistemology centers on religious beliefs, experience the child welfare system in Ontario? Being a front-line child protection worker was not my first encounter with the child welfare system. I became a foster parent in the system in 1994 and fostered in the Alternate Care Program (ACP), a program designed to provide respite care of up to ten days for children with special needs. This program had been a positive experience for my family. We welcomed children with significant medical needs and diverse racial and religious backgrounds into our home. Their families were welcomed too! On occasions we had siblings of our “foster kids” for sleep overs and we maintained long-term relationships with the families.  

The APC was discontinued with the introduction of the Harris government’s neoliberal policies. 

My Children’s Aid Society (CAS) worker encouraged me to continue fostering and I agreed to take younger children. The society was often “short of beds,” often requesting that I take sibling groups and older children, including Muslim children. Unlike my experience with the ACP, fostering children removed from their homes revealed the dark and ugly side of child welfare. These “placed” children were not allowed contact with their parents and workers painted parents as a danger to the children and (in some cases) to foster parents. I struggled with the hierarchical structures of the CAS. Parents and families were obviously at the bottom, with foster parents constructed as “good people” providing services for children in need. Then, there were the workers with power over foster parents; I wondered whether this power dynamic played out differently with white foster parents?

At that time my purview of the power system ended here, it has grown significantly since.

Two themes emerged for me while fostering. First, I was struck by the reaction of children placed in our home; the children were never happy and did not want to be there. I recall one instance with two young brothers crying incessantly for three days. They stood by the front window of my house looking out and continuously asking when their father was coming for them. I later learned their family were new immigrants and the apprehension revolved around something the family could not have known would be a child protection issue. Addressing the issue of discipline would have been much less harmful than removing them from their home before a thorough investigation. The five days it took to file the protection application and have a court hearing. Though they were returned, this must have been the most traumatic experience of their little lives. Can you imagine? Being in a strange country and suddenly losing your family – not knowing where your parents are, not being allowed to speak with them? The memories of those five days still haunts me.

The second theme is the racism that surfaced. My interface with the young white social workers that brought children to be placed in my home revealed this quite readily. Obvious shock and discomfort on first encounters with workers were telling. Foster parents had a particular profile: white, middle class, and Christian. A profile I did not fit. Foster mothers could not be immigrants, especially not immigrants who look like me – Muslim. I noted discomfort and reluctance when placing white children in my home, but foster homes were in high demand.

That the system is embedded in racism reared its grotesque head again when I started working as a child protection worker.  In my work with clients, I experienced racism on many occasions. Among other things (some too vile to repeat) I was told that I am not Canadian and don’t know anything about Canadian laws, that I should go back where I came from, and that I cannot speak English. At the office, I was frequently being confused for the one other brown body in the organization of 400+ employees. I also had supervisors who took complaints of my inability to speak English seriously. Seriously? Yes! Although I am a native English speaker.

These experiences evoked many questions in me:

-        How is the system experienced by BIPOC and religiously diverse folks who are clients at the bottom of the hierarchy?

-        How would the intersection of being a client and being racialized/marginalized be experienced?

-        Are there specific aspects of this intersection that cause religiously diverse and racialized clients to experience more harm?

The culture of child welfare seemed to be fear based, in the office and in clients’ home. Marginalized clients whose distinctiveness is characterized by intersections that includes newness to Canada, racialized identities and religious differences seem to absorb this fear more. I know this because it is my experience as a foster mother and a child protection worker. But is my subjectivity playing into my “knowing?”

I started my PhD research in 2014 and my research process revealed more of the fear-based culture of the system than I anticipated. Agencies that had conveyed conviction about the necessity of my research and a willingness to help were no longer prepared to work with me when I reached the research phase.

The Muslim community was also reluctant to engage alongside me as families that received child welfare services. In my findings, “fear” of the system was a considerable theme. Significant themes uncovered in my research highlighted that the system is not set up to accommodate religious differences and new immigrants face many struggles when they come up against the child welfare system.

A family I interviewed had taken a 6-month journey to get to the safety of Canada as government sponsored refugees from a war-torn country. Within a year, they lost their children to the system and in the parents’ words “we lost our children, we lost hope.” They had not lost hope in their war-torn homeland, they had not lost hope on the long and perilous journey to Canada. But they lost hope when child protection “protected” their children by apprehending them.