sweet, harmful lies or harsh, liberating truths? the choice is ours…
In elementary school, we were taught a little poem, “Sticks and stones may break my
bones, but words can never hurt me.” It was meant as an affront to bullies. We were told not to
directly challenge what the bullies were saying, but simply to let them know that their words
didn’t matter because they could never hurt us. Of course, this was all a lie. Words do matter, and
they can cause harm. (I highly doubt I’m the only person who has cried – as a child and adult –
when hurtful words were purposely said to me.) The words we choose to use as individuals, as
organizations, as governments can speak truth, myths, or outright lies. If we aren’t honest in our
words, how can we be honest in our actions?
When I think about the intergenerational disenfranchisement my children and I live with
due to my removal from my family of origin, I think about the language that was used to justify
the permanent separation of a mother and her child. It’s part of a troubling and problematic
lexicon that is still used today by social workers, politicians, and much of the general public.
I was taken away from my mother, and the rest of my family, at birth. The reason:
poverty. How could she, a Brown woman who lacked financial stability, a husband, and even
basic literacy, possibly raise yet another child? (Having said this, she was already lovingly and
successfully raising her other three children…) There was only one solution offered to her for her
pregnancy “problem”: transnational adoption. Afterall, that was “in the child’s best interests,”
according to those who ran the “orphanage” and a social worker at International Social Services.
To ensure I could be made “available for adoption,” I had to be labelled as an “orphan” who had
been “abandoned.” To achieve this, my mother, who is fully nonliterate, was taught how to write
her signature so that she could sign on the dotted line of a multipage document that terminated
her parental rights. I was neither abandoned nor an orphan. I was a baby whose mother had been
coerced. And, once she signed those papers with her name, the first printed words she had ever
written, I was legally motherless. Family-less. Despite what International Social Services still
says today on their advocacy webpage, I do not believe that “intercountry adoption is a
protection measure that is used only in the child’s best interests” (International Social Services,
n.d.). While stick and stones may break my bones, the words used by the adoption industry have
hurt me.
Although the details of my family’s story are unique to us, the rhetoric of acting in the
“best interests of children,” a concept which is intentionally vague, has been encoded in
Canadian law (Government of Ontario, n.d.), enabling and allowing the destruction of countless
families through the forcible removal of children from their own homes to foster care, group
homes, and adoptive home settings. There is a language of false benevolence that cloaks the
systematic separation of families. Depending on geographic location, institutions that remove
children from their families, often under the guise of “neglect” (another nebulous term), may be
referred to as “children’s aid society,” “child protection services,” or the “child welfare system.”
The motivation behind the first “child rescue initiatives” (yes, that says rescue!) in
Toronto, Canada, in the 1880s, was the preservation of “the dominance of the white race”
(Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, 2022). When we couple this with the federal
government-backed and social work(er)-supported Residential School System and Sixties Scoop
(again, note the myth of benevolence/non-violence behind both of those terms), we see a pattern
of genocide against Indigenous Peoples in both Canada and the United States. Today, Indigenous
and Black children and families remain disproportionately affected by what is still commonly
called the child welfare system. Where is the so-called welfare or aid or protection of children
and their families in such a system?
In the spirit of truth-telling, honesty, advocacy, and resistance, I have had to search for
more accurate language to describe and discuss the systematic surveilling, controlling, punishing,
and separating of Indigenous, Black, low-income, and other racialized and minoritized families.
So, in line with many esteemed experts in the field – all of whom have much more expertise than
I do – I now use the term family policing system because I cannot, in good conscience, continue
to speak of such a harmful system as a “child welfare” system. While contemplating all of this on
a walk the other day, I noticed a parked police car. Emblazoned on the side was their slogan, “To
serve & protect.” Yup, the term ‘family policing system’ is the perfect description, I thought.
References
Government of Ontario. (n.d.). Child, youth and family services act, 2017, s.o. 2017, c. 14,
sched. 1. e-Laws | Ontario.ca. https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/17c14
International Social Services. (n.d.). ISS advocates for better protection of rights over 75,000
families each year. ISS SSI. https://iss-ssi.org/advocacy/
Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies. (2022, September 22). Child welfare,
residential schools, and truth and reconciliation: A brief history on National Day for
Truth and Reconciliation. https://www.oacas.org/2022/09/child-welfare-residentialschools-
and-truth-and-reconciliation-a-brief-history-on-national-day-for-truth-andreconciliation/