I’ve been posting case examples from the Representative for Children and Youth report Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems.
Here are number five and six; the first four are in posts below.
You can read and judge if the system is working to protect children.
I felt an overwhelming wave of horror and sadness at this week’s news of the mass slaughter of sled dogs outside of Whistler, BC. It’s receiving a lot of attention in the media, and rightly so; if that attention leads to better oversight and treatment of animals, then at least those dogs’ suffering (as well as that of the man who killed them) won’t have been in vain.
I don’t begrudge this story any of the ink and airtime that it has received. But I do wish another story – one that has been happened over the course of years in British Columbia – was receiving some of the same media scrutiny and public outcry.
Paul Willcocks, the journalist behind Paying attention, has devoted much of his aptly-named blog’s focus to failures in BC’s child protection system. But while the rest of British Columbia’s media reports from time to time on the issue, his is one of the very few voices speaking out consistently and forcefully. (I’ve mentioned him before in this blog for that reason.)
The excerpt above is from the latest in a series of posts that simply excerpt case examples from a report by BC’s Representative for Children and Youth on the deaths of 21 infants. The story got a day’s worth of attention from most of BC’s media outlets. But Willcocks has been posting these excerpts now for several days.
I’ll warn you – these can be wrenching to read. Reports of abuse or danger go uninvestigated; warning signs are missed; and children suffer and die.
The villain in this story is not any one individual or a corporation; it’s a system (actually, systems). And instead of taking place at a single site on one day, this story’s setting is scattered across months and years in communities throughout the province – many of them remote.
This story – these stories – aren’t nearly as easy to tell as the tragedy of the Whistler sled dogs. But telling difficult, complex, important stories is one of those things journalism is supposed to be able to do… in fact, what it’s supposed to excel at. It’s one of the things that the champions of mainstream journalism, especially print, hold up as a key advantage over blogs and other forms of social media.
As for the rest of us, maybe we feel helpless. Maybe we don’t think this is a problem that can be solved, and that a system starved for resources and coordination is the best that we can offer the at-risk children of our province. Maybe we’re drawn more to stories that suggest simple resolutions than complex ones. Maybe we’ve heard too many times that the system is going to be overhauled and this time it’s going to work – and we’ve lost hope. Or maybe we just take our cues for what’s important from others.
Whatever the reason, here’s hoping that sometime soon, we’ll see a more sustained focus and relentless push from BC’s media outlets – and from the public – than this latest report received. In the meantime, we have Paul Willcocks.
