On Wednesday, Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin Ross pledged to find ‘alternative safe places’ within 60 days for foster children living at hotels. Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross ordered her department on April 1, 2015, to find ‘alternative safe places’ for foster children within 60 days.Lyle Stafford/The Globe and Mail
The victim of a violent sexual assault and her alleged attacker are both foster children who had been placed at the same Winnipeg hotel – the latest revelation in a case that native leaders say proves the child-welfare system is damaging to the vulnerable people it is supposed to protect.
The April 1 assault on a teenaged girl in the Manitoba capital prompted the provincial government's pledge this week to remove all foster children from hotels by June 1. It has also triggered a pair of probes by the Office of the Children's Advocate and Child and Family Services, which will review the services the victim and the accused had been receiving.
Native leaders said the victim, who is in critical condition and has not been publicly identified, is aboriginal. Police said Thursday the victim knew the accused, a 15-year-old male who was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault for his alleged involvement in the attack. The male, who has not been named because he is a minor, is being held at the Manitoba Youth Centre.
The accused had flagged a passing police cruiser to alert officers to the injured female. He was initially considered a witness, but police said his story was not making sense.
Derek Nepinak, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, said he was not surprised to learn the accused was in foster care. "Oftentimes our young people are becoming lost in the system, and they're not developing the same type of normative standards and morals that you'd expect growing up in a more nuclear or extended-family setting," he said. "We need to look toward nurturing the spirit. That's completely absent from the equation right now."
The attack marks the second high-profile crime in less than a year involving a teenaged aboriginal girl who had been placed in a hotel. In August, 15-year-old Tina Fontaine was killed after going missing from her placement at the Best Western Charter House. Her death reignited calls for a national inquiry into Canada's murdered and missing indigenous women and sparked fresh scrutiny of the child-welfare system. In Manitoba, nearly 90 per cent of the more than 10,000 children and youth in care are native.
The Globe and Mail has been investigating the province's emergency child-welfare system since October. It found some children were living in hotels for weeks at a time. A recent visit to one downtown Winnipeg hotel revealed a spike in the number of foster children staying in hotels, even after the government promised in November to reduce its reliance on them.
Hours after the assault, Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross said she ordered her department to find "alternative safe places" for children within 60 days – an announcement that was immediately met with skepticism by native leaders who question the government's motives. Asked Thursday about the fact that the accused was also in care, a spokeswoman for the minister said Ms. Irvin-Ross would not comment further because of the police investigation.
The Winnipeg Police Service said officers located the injured female in the downtown area around 4:50 a.m. Wednesday – 11 minutes prior to her being reported missing from care.
Dawn Harvard, the interim president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, said she is concerned that children are being removed from their homes in the name of safety only to then be placed in situations where they are extremely vulnerable. She said she also fears wards of the province are not getting the counselling they need to address the neglect or violence they may have experienced before they came into care.
"If they're not getting sufficient contact, love and support from a loving family, then children end up with maladaptive behaviours," she said. "They might act out because they haven't been given the basic necessities of life – and the basic necessities aren't just food, water and a roof, it's also human contact and love."
Ms. Harvard said she hopes the government will fulfill its commitment to remove all foster children from care within 60 days. The woman who raised Tina, her great-aunt Thelma Favel, told The Globe she has "no confidence" the province will make good on its promise.
With a report from The Canadian Press