I'd like to speak just a bit about a few other topics that I think increase vulnerability for women in particular. I did a report, and my reports are publicly available at the website of the B.C. Representative for Children and Youth. I apologize for the fact that it is not the policy of the legislature of British Columbia to translate all reports into French, so I know that they are not going to be automatically deposited with your committee, but I invite committee members to look at them.
I did a report in the fall of 2013 on a first nations child who was transferred from British Columbia to Saskatchewan, where she was severely abused by her caregivers, a grandparent and step-grandmother. They were later convicted for failing to provide the necessities of life to that child. In that report I spoke quite a bit as a result of my investigation into the circumstances of her mother. She is a mom who as a girl was abused in a community in Saskatchewan, a first nations community. She basically ran from the community to try to start a new life in British Columbia, found herself in the Downtown Eastside using IV drugs, having serious addictions, in part because she couldn't cope and was overwhelmed with her childhood experience of being physically and sexually abused. She had a child, a little girl, who was the subject of the report. She was still struggling with addictions and asked the state, the Province of B.C., to take the child and see that the child could receive a better home than she could provide because she was so deep in the addiction cycle.
Certainly in investigating that case and dealing with the mom, I think it is really important for Canadians to understand how much struggle moms such as this one experience in their lives and how, while she was in an addiction cycle—and she has periods of recovery—she never received adequate support during her early years. She has not been given adequate support to recover from some of the difficulties she experienced around physical and sexual abuse in her community.
Her child then came into care and was sent to Saskatchewan. Ironically, the child was sent back into the very community where the mom said she had been abused, and the child was abused in the very same family. That child is now in a foster care situation and is approximately 10 years old. I do have fear about intergenerational abuse. How will we disrupt these cycles, not simply saying, “Here's the problem that we see but we're not actually disrupting it by addressing the cycle and the fact that there is both physical and sexual abuse occurring”?
It was quite an informative process in terms of being able to, in a very non-judgemental way, in a very supportive way, speak to indigenous women about the struggles they've faced, the difficulties they've faced, and to try to understand their pathways to vulnerability, but also how to protect and support their children so that they can have greater success. This is an area that requires some direct front-line experience from service providers, but also an engagement with indigenous women and children so that we can come to a much stronger understanding of what types of interventions are needed to support the resiliency.
Certainly understanding the pathway is one thing, but you have to actually provide services to disrupt it. I think that we need to be cognizant in Canada that this is the pathway that continues. I certainly share the concern at the national level about women who may be missing, women who may be tragically murdered, or who take their own life early in very tragic situations, and the loss that their families experience. But the fact is that there may often have been multiple lost opportunities to intervene in those lives positively and supportively to disrupt those pathways and I think that is one of our key challenges in Canada.