“Every one who, in the home of a child, participates in adultery or sexual immorality or indulges in habitual drunkenness or any other form of vice, and thereby endangers the morals of the child (under 18) or renders the home an unfit place for the child to be in, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.”
Wow! Can you imagine what would happen if everyone took that seriously? There are parents so drunk so regularly there’s not much point in calling them parents – and not just in our neighbourhood.
The Child and Family Services Act (Section 17), states that “a child is in need of protection where the life, health or emotional well-being of the child is endangered by the act or omission of a person.” The Act also states that a child is in need of protection when the child is beyond the control of a person who has the care, custody, control or charge of the child.
There’s a lot of messed up families and kids at risk in our community. But CFS intake workers have redefined “at risk” to exclude many of the kids in homes with drunks, addicts and vandals. It’s odd that kids living in situations deemed “criminal” by the feds, are deemed not “at risk” by provincial employees.
Provincial politicians want to spend money on more cops and more gyms, but that won’t fix messed up families.
Why give more money to cops to pick up the kids neglected by CFS? There is an attitude and allocation problem in the police department that far exceeds the resource problem. To provide more resources to a department where some “insiders” still rag on police foot-patrols won’t help our community.
I feel pretty bad for our community cops. They go plainclothes to do surveillance or bust johns and they get criticized for not being in uniform. They patrol in uniforms and they get accused of not doing surveillance and busts of drug houses.
Community cops get abuse in the community for not being around enough, when it’s not their fault they’re among the first to get yanked off their beat for events and parades elsewhere. Then they get stabbed in the back by a gutless anonymous police administrator who accuses them of “grin and wave” policing.
Providing more cops won’t help if they’re not allocated in the ways we need them.
Providing more crown prosecutors won’t help if the judges still have their heads so stuck in a vacuum they can’t see, hear or smell the chaos on our streets. Why don’t they ever come meet with community groups? Maybe there’s something about their jobs we can’t understand unless we hear it direct from them.
Finally, late night recreational facilities are touted by some as a cure for what ails us. And the argument usually goes like this: “The kids need somewhere safe to play at night. Sometimes the last place they want to be is at home because it’s just not safe.”
Give me a break!! If the problem is at home, talking about gyms is ducking the issue. The problem for these families is not lack of recreation, it’s lack of intervention.
Don’t get me wrong. I know recreation serves a purpose. But if the problem is drunken parents, the solution is not to cover our unwillingness to deal with the home situation by providing a gym to which to flee. Maybe they figure when the kid dribbles their ball home at 4am, the adults will be passed out and everything will be okay. But will that kid even make it home alive?
You can’t hire enough cops or prosecutors or “recreation technicians” to cover for the job not being done by families or, alternately, CFS.
The province should take a clue from their really successful “Safer Communities” initiative. They enacted legislation and hired several investigators to do surveillance and prosecute the civil disruption caused by criminal behavior. It makes sense. Criminal behavior is usually evidenced in civil disruption long before it can be proven in criminal courts.
These “Safer Communities” officers work well with cops and the community. It’s a great example of a complementary, community-oriented (as opposed to court-fixated) approach to crack and sniff houses in our neighbourhood.
Maybe, instead of avoiding families in crisis with talk of gyms and more cops – the province could hire some special CFS/Justice constables to intervene with troubled families.
The provincial government has spent much of the past three years reorganizing CFS and starting a separate Aboriginal “CFS” agency. Maybe now they can focus more energy on ensuring that both groups actually do their job.
Rev. Harry Lehotsky
514 Maryland Street
Winnipeg, Mb R3G 1M5
(204) 775-4929
lehotsky@escape.ca