Black community members say the understandable anxiety black parents experience when schools call Children’s Aid to question their child contributes to the problem of overrepresentation.
Beverly Valentine, a family counsellor with the Jamaican Canadian Association, describes the all-too common scenario, confirmed by numerous Star interviews with parents involved with CAS .
You are looking for your child to come home and your child doesn’t come home and that’s when you find out that the CAS is involved and your child is being interrogated.
How are you going to react? Of course, you are going to be angry.
So the mother comes in and she’s heightened. What does the worker think? ‘She’s not co-operating. She’s being angry. She’s not listening’.
The mother wants to see her child. Obviously, she’s going to explode even more. So she gets branded as un-cooperative before the case even gets started. The police haven’t even been called.
It makes it even worse when the police officers c ...
