CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT INDEX

Children are the most vulnerable members of society, and it is tragic when institutions charged with protecting children fail to do so. It is especially tragic, however, when malign influences such as stereotyping and perverse ideology infect the behavior of those institutions or their agents. For in that case, the resulting harm to children could have been totally avoided. Among such influences today are anti-male and anti-father stereotypes and value-judgements: attitudes that fathers are apt to be a danger to children, and that children don’t really need their fathers in the first place. The articles in this section will reveal both the perverse falsity of those attitudes and the horror caused by their influence on unaccountable bureaucrats given massive power over people’s lives. The general discussions (labels beginning with A) and case studies (labels beginning with B) below are meant to reveal the problem graphically in hopes of spurring all the needed reforms.

This article is a set of suggested reforms to deal with the lack of external accountability in Alberta's Child Welfare system. It was presented at a meeting of top Alberta Social Services executives, along with a number of individual horror-stories, in October of 1999. To date, MERGE has received no response from that presentation.