June 13, 2008
Meet Willie: 10 years old, homeless and unloved
In Kuujjuaq, neglected children roam the streets unattended
AGNÈS GRUDA -- REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF LA PRESSE
Last year, Willie spent the whole summer outdoors. Day and night. To escape his violent father, the 10-year-old spent most nights sleeping on the beach in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik's largest community.
Willie's father gets drunk. And when he drinks, he's capable of doing anything - punching his son, throwing him against the wall or spitting in his face.
So Willie spent the summer wandering. Sometimes he slept on the grey sand banks of the Koksoak River. Other times he found refuge under houses to get out of the rain.
Willie isn't alone: about 20 kids, swaddled in three or four sweaters, spend their summers outdoors in this town of 2,300 people located two and a half hours by air from Montreal.
The community street worker knows them well, these little street people of Kuujjuaq. He goes to the beach every day to bring bananas to some of them. Like Willie, some of them are just 10 years old.
He alerted youth protection officials about Willie's plight.
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But the file got lost in the system after a social worker left. It was only several months later, after his father finally hit him one too many times, that Willie was placed with a foster family.
But his problems didn't end there. That's because in his new family, alcohol flowed like water.
On May 26, Willy didn't like what he saw in his new home. So he called the police.
When we arrived there at about 10 p.m. with the social worker on call, Willy was in front of the house with his grandparents, telling his story to the police. He wore too-tight jeans and a hooded sweatshirt in chilly, near-freezing temperatures.
What happened? Were they drinking? The social work tried to pry some information out of him. Why not spend the night at his grandparents?
"Maybe because they don't have any room," Willy whispered in a tiny voice.
When we stopped in front of one of the homes that offers emergency foster care, Willy froze.
"I don't want to go there," he murmured. We never learned why.
Finally, the boy, whose name we changed to protect his privacy, found a bed with a family that already takes care of another child.
But for how long?
This is what youth protection is like in Nunavik: children left on their own by screwed-up families who have been ignored for too long by social services.
And, due to a shortage of good foster families, they're tossed around from crisis to crisis.
Last fall, in the wake of a report on this situation by the Quebec Commission for Human Rights and the Rights of Children, the government posted 18 job openings for social workers in the region.
How many were hired? Not one.
It's not surprising that the commission's 21 recommendations have not been acted upon, as an investigation by the union representing social workers in seven Ungava Bay communities has revealed.
The lack of staff is also felt at the management level. The youth protection office for the Ungava Bay region has been without a director for several months. After two months on the job, the assistant director quit this past April.
This one of a series of articles by Agnès Gruda published last week in the daily French-language Quebec newspaper, La Presse. We have translated and reprinted this article with her permission and that of La Presse. You may search for the others at: www.cyberpresse.ca.
