EDMONTON—Seated at the band office in his home of Enoch Cree Nation, Steven Morin shuts his eyes as he describes the sensory triggers for his childhood PTSD — the sight of showers or the smell of Head & Shoulders can bring him back to the moments when his foster mother’s boyfriend molested him.
But the most vivid memory from Morin’s childhood is the day he was taken from home at four years old.
He recalls the day with striking detail, despite his age at the time. He remembers the pattern of the wooden panels in the station wagon that took him from home, the bright orange sky stretching above him, the tears rolling down his mother’s cheeks as she hugged him goodbye.
“The whole sky was orange,” Morin recalls. “It was such a beautiful summer, for such a sh—-y day.”
There are other memories still deeply ingrained in Morin’s psyche from his time as a ward of Alberta’s child intervention system — a system he says failed him and left him vulnerable to five years of violence, emotional abuse and sexual assault.
“I’d sit there praying that I wouldn’t get this harm done to me. But it never worked,” Morin says while shaking his head. “It was tons of pain, man. But there was nothing I could do, though. I was just a little kid. A child without a childhood.”
Morin has filed an $11-million lawsuit against Alberta’s Director of Child Services — the legal entity responsible for children in government care. In the statement of claim filed Thursday, Morin and his lawyer Robert P. Lee allege Alberta Child Intervention — a department within the Ministry of Child Services — failed in its duty to monitor the foster home Morin was living in and screen all occupants to ensure the children were safe.
Morin’s story is one of thousands that social workers, lawyers and child advocates hear on a regular basis, Lee said.
“I have been arguing for the last 20 years on behalf of my clients that when the courts put children into the care of Alberta (Child Intervention) that they are too frequently putting those children at severe risk,” Lee said.
Speaking generally about issues within the province’s child intervention system, the Alberta government said they are aware of the system’s failings and are committed to working with First Nations and Métis partners to improve outcomes for Indigenous children in government care.
Morin’s allegations have not been proven in court. A judge will hear the case on Sept. 10.
Morin was born to a single mother on Enoch Cree Nation, the third oldest of four siblings. His family has experienced five generations of government interference; his mother, grandmother, great grandmother and great-great grandmother were all involved in either the foster-care or residential-school systems.
His early childhood was turbulent; his biological mother had her own trauma from her time in the foster-care system. She became overwhelmed by child rearing when he was four and decided it was best if Morin lived under government care. He was taken and placed in a foster home in Edmonton, where he says he suffered extensive abuse.
Starting in or around 1998, Morin alleges, he was sexually abused by his foster mother’s boyfriend, John Edward Beaver, from age five to nine. He says he was also forced to engage in sexual acts with his siblings and that Beaver threatened to kill him if he told anyone.
Court documents show Beaver was facing three counts of sexual assault against a minor and two counts of possession of child pornography in 1999. All of the charges were withdrawn except one count of child pornography; Beaver pleaded guilty and was convicted. He served six months in jail.
Despite the conviction, court records show Beaver moved back into the home shortly after his release. The molestation continued, Morin said. He was seven years old.
Morin said he felt alone, helpless and lived in constant fear of being abused. He didn’t tell anyone of the molestation because he didn’t have anyone he trusted.
“I really had no one so I couldn’t tell no one. I felt like I was a Ken doll; they can do whatever they want to me ... If I say something, I know it won’t make a difference. Because the government is who my parents are now. And there’s nothing I can do, because if I say something they’ll just put me in another home and it’ll happen again.”
At age nine, Morin was placed in a group home after cornering a babysitter in the home with scissors. Lee says this was a desperate cry for help.
When he was moved, it was the first time Morin felt free from the abuse.
“I felt really happy, a lot of relief to get out of that home,” he says. “I just felt comfort. Something I’ve never felt before.”
At age 12, he told a group home worker about the abuse. He was forwarded to Edmonton’s Zebra Child Protection Centre, where he gave a statement, which was given to Edmonton police.
Beaver was charged with 13 counts of sexual assault against a minor in 2007, including three charges naming Morin. He died before he could go to trial.
Lee says the fact that a convicted sex offender was allowed to live with minors while in a position of trust illustrates how poorly co-ordinated Alberta’s child intervention system was at that time. He says Child Intervention was negligent in investigating Beaver and considering the risk he posed to children.
In a bail hearing after Beaver was charged with numerous counts of sexual assault against a minor, a lawyer said Morin’s foster mother would leave Beaver as the sole adult responsible for the children on a regular basis.
“It is incomprehensible how a person criminally charged with child-sexual-abuse allegations and with a conviction of possessing child pornography could be allowed anywhere near foster children,” he said.
Morin said he saw his social workers just two to four times a year, when a “major event” happened. He didn’t have a close relationship with his primary social worker, so he didn’t feel safe disclosing details of the abuse.
To this day he doesn’t understand how Beaver was allowed back in the house after his conviction, or if child services even knew.
“They failed me,” Morin says. “They didn’t do their visits properly. This guy never had a criminal record check. They apparently never knew he was living with her.”
He says he struggled to access counselling and therapy as a teenager. He ended up with numerous addictions, which he has overcome. Today he still grapples with emotional, psychological and physical scars from his childhood and is seeing a therapist for a childhood PTSD diagnosis.
“You don’t move on,” Morin says. “You just move forward.”
Morin’s allegations are echoed in the life of Serenity, a four-year-old girl whose death in government care in 2014 prompted a review of the system.
In a report on Serenity’s death, Alberta’s child and youth advocate Del Graff reported that she died of a brain injury, which her guardians blamed on a fall. Media reports later found evidence of sexual abuse and that her injuries were inconsistent with a fall.
Graff said child intervention services had “minimal” contact with her guardians in the year leading to her death, despite her biological mother’s concerns and significant signs of neglect and abuse.
Graff’s investigation discovered that criminal record and child intervention checks were done for Serenity’s main guardians, but not for the adult children living in the home. He also found the caseworker did not conduct separate interviews with other children or grandchildren in the home.
In his report, Graff called for more thorough home assessments, mandatory orientation training for caregivers and strengthened assessments for children’s physical and emotional well being before being placed into care.
In Morin’s statement of claim, Lee says child intervention and Morin’s foster mother ought to have known a convicted sex offender was living with children, but the root of the issue is that Alberta’s child welfare system is chronically underfunded and under-resourced.
“One of the things that I think is fundamentally broken and one of the things I want to sue (Child Intervention) for is that they are understaffed,” Lee said.
“So you might get some really good workers who really want to try and make a difference, but what they find out is they’re not allowed to make a difference because one, the government really doesn’t want to help, they won’t put the resources where it belongs, and secondly, they don’t have enough hours in a day and in a week to do their job properly. Because there’s not enough workers.”
Just over a year ago, the NDP provincial government released an action plan to overhaul the system and take “decisive steps” to improve safety, increase accountability and strengthen supports for children and youth. The government also committed to “transform” its approach in working with Indigenous families and youth.
The action plan, called A Stronger, Safer Tomorrow, includes 39 actions to be implemented by 2022, alongside 16 immediate actions by April 2019. The immediate actions included increased cultural learning opportunities to address racism within Children’s Services, supporting self-determination and early intervention to prevent children from being taken into care and allowing families, communities and youth to play a bigger role in determining what care is needed.
The UCP government says those immediate actions have been completed and they are still committed to the overall plan.
Alberta’s minister of Child Services, Rebecca Schulz, acknowledged the system’s historic failings in an interview with Star Edmonton. She said Serenity’s death, and the subsequent review, was a “catalyst for transformative change” within the ministry.
“We do take all of the recommendations very seriously and have been working every day to change the way the way we work … We’re going to stay on top of those issues,” Schulz said.
She said the government has allocated $8.3 million from the province’s supplementary supply to continue the work that is underway.
Schulz said some of the work the government is undertaking is increasing training to ensure kinship providers and families have adequate supports and information to keep children connected to their culture, community and family; placing greater emphasis on the importance of kinship care; and enhancing youth suicide prevention, intervention and support programs. Schulz said the government is also working with the ministry of mental health and addictions to improve outcomes for children placed in care.
There has been a shift in the past two decades to emphasize the importance of kinship care, which is when a child is placed with a close family member or friend rather than a stranger. But as illustrated by Serenity’s case, that is not a fail-safe solution.
Graff, Alberta’s child advocate, noted in his report that the home assessment process when placing a child into kinship care relies too heavily on the applicants’ self reporting.
Schulz could not give further details on how the government will pay for implementing all the action plan’s recommendations, as the provincial budget has not been released, but said her government is making sure front line workers have adequate resources.
“We have to make sure that our front line services our funded. Our role is to ensure that vulnerable children in this province are safe,” she said.
Critics of Alberta’s child intervention system, which provides services to more than 10,000 youth, says it has long been built around an outdated model that unnecessarily removes children from their communities and culture, is inherently discriminatory and severely underfunded.
Indigenous children are massively overrepresented in the system, more than any other population in Canada. While they make up about nine per cent of children in Alberta, they account for 69 per cent of children in care, according to the Alberta government.
Today, there are more Indigenous children in government care than there were at the height of the residential school system.
The two systems are directly linked, says Peter Choate, an associate professor of social work at Mount Royal University who served on the government’s 12-month, all-party Ministerial Panel on Child Intervention, which was formed following a series of explosive stories about Serenity.
“We have to recognize that assimilation, colonization, cultural genocide and the residential schools all link directly with the existing involvement of child welfare in the lives of Indigenous families,” Choate said.
“That’s something many people struggle with because they like to think in some ways that the historical patterns in Canada are not represented by the current economic or social behaviours of the populations. Whereas we know that’s not the case,” he added.
Choate said there needs to be a fundamental shift in the approach to how the government intervenes in child care, as well as a greater understanding of how the legacy of intergenerational trauma from residential schools impacts families today.
“The majority of kids that are in care are not there for reasons of physical or sexual abuse. They’re there for reasons of neglect that are related to the legacies of colonialism and also related to things like poverty,” Choate said. “They’re there because either the resources don’t exist, the supports don’t exist, the trauma is not healed and they’re at a significant social and economic disadvantage.”
The system is inherently discriminatory, Choate said, because it diminishes the importance of Indigenous understanding of family parenting and culture, fails to acknowledge the impact of intergenerational trauma and assesses the parenting capability of mothers and fathers from a Eurocentric standpoint.
Choate said it’s imperative that the government transforms its approach to child intervention to ensure cases like Morin’s and Serenity’s don’t repeat themselves.
“Failing to solve this is costing us millions and millions of dollars and it’s costing us lives,” Choate said.
“This us Canada’s problem. There is no Canadian who is not a part of this issue. As a Canadian, can you look an Indigenous child in the eyes and say, ‘You’re not worth as much as a white child?’ As a nation, we’ve been doing it. To hundreds of thousands of children in this country, that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Today, Morin is still on his healing journey and working to challenge inadequacies in the child welfare system. He is the founder of Breaking the Chains, an organization to help survivors of abuse and intergenerational trauma, and the Indigenous Children’s Mentoring Society, which is modelled on Big Brothers Big Sisters.
“There’s a lot of children in our communities that are plagued by intergenerational trauma. For me, as an Indigenous person, I can help,” Morin says.
“I always had this feeling that I was meant to do something better … I really want to try and get other people to start speaking about things. And to start healing.”
Correction: Aug. 29, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the per cent of children in care in Alberta who are Indigenous. In fact, 69 per cent of children in care are Indigenous.
