The woman demanded custody after she needed to escape the hell her husband had put her through for too long.
The girl wanted to go to her mother.
But when the DPJ employee assessed the case, she saw only a dispute between the parents, in technical jargon a separation conflict, and immediately gave the woman the label of alienating her mother because she had expressed her concerns about her father. With the click of a pen, the mother became the villain of the story.
Where did the teenager go? She was placed in a rehabilitation center which, I repeat, is intended to be the last resort for young people with the most serious cases and for those who have major behavioral problems. Not for a young girl who has done nothing wrong, who just wants to live with her mother.
Not only can this teenager not live with her mother, she only sees her supervised for one hour a week in case she talks to her about her father.
The irony of the story is that the DPJ gave the mother sole custody of the couple’s other child after the young girl was removed. Therefore, she was judged to have good parenting skills and to be very good at caring for her children and meeting their needs.
In the DPJ’s game plan, we want the girl to get back in touch with her father, even if she categorically refuses to see him under any circumstances. As a result, this young girl has been living in a place that is not at all suitable for her for more than a year, and the situation has not changed a bit: she still does not want to know anything about her father, begs to live with his mother.
Regardless, the DPJ is not shying away, it has just convinced the court that this girl of about fifteen must remain in a rehabilitation center until she turns 18, while continuing to see her mother under supervision.
She can then walk home.
And after that they tell us that the DYP must be the child protection emergency room while they insist on forcing a teenager to see his abusive father. A father who, according to the files, doesn’t seem to be very cooperative. Is this really a sensible use of DPJ resources?
The Post-Laurent Commission was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era in child protection, putting an end to the horror stories so that we would no longer find a little girl choking on paper on an apartment floor. sticky. We said, Granby, never again. But we continue to use resources where they are not needed, rather than to use them where they are needed.
Given the labor shortage, this is untenable.
A year and a half ago, the government passed a legislative reform in which it insisted that from now on the best interests of the child must be at the heart of all decisions, falsely suggesting that this was not the case in the previous version. The name says it all, the aim of child protection is to… protect young people.
That is his reason for being.
Except that.
We still often look out for the child’s best interests, in certain cases like this teenager where we are clearly missing something. However, the new law should prevent situations like this where domestic violence that continues after a separation is concealed because it is perceived as a separation conflict. The national director for child protection, Catherine Lemay, had even called for a one-year delay for the entry into force of this measure, citing the need for training.
In an ideal world, we should be able to go back to all the files in the Separation Conflict section to see if we didn’t make a mistake.
In an ideal world, this young girl’s place is with her mother.
* Fictional first name
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