A British Columbia mother who needed help with her son is fighting to get him back.
She alleges the temporary arrangement she agreed to with the Ministry of Children and Family Development was not honoured and her child was seized from her custody.
“I miss him. My home does not feel like a home without him,” she says. We cannot identify her because her seven-year-old boy is in the ministry’s care.
The mother says she was the one who reached out to the ministry for help. At the time, she was 29 weeks pregnant and her son was acting out in violent ways.
She negotiated a Voluntary Care Agreement with the ministry.
In a phone call she shared with Global News, the social worker could be heard saying that the mother was refusing to sign the VCA.
She is heard saying the revised VCA scrapped the agreed-upon amendments and she wasn’t refusing to sign it but wanted to collaborate on a new agreement.
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But the social worker informed her that her son was removed from her care.
“Shocking and jarring,” she says of the experience. “Trying to quite literally coerce me into signing a new VCA, which was different and did not safeguard making sure that my son’s needs were met, which was the entire reason for the VCA in the first place.”
Angela Clancy, executive director of the Family Support Institute of BC, describes this family’s case as shocking.
“It’s in the title: it’s voluntary, it’s optional. So, to actually remove a child from a parent and from their home based on a family refusing to sign a voluntary care agreement didn’t make sense to me,” Clancy says.
Disability advocate Tamara Taggart has been helping other parents navigate their case with the ministry and says there is a disturbing pattern.
“It’s usually a single mom who has a child with a disability or support needs, and she asks for help from the ministry, and her child is apprehended,” she says.
Minister Jodie Wickens says she cannot comment on specific cases and provided an emailed statement, reading in part: “Our role is to work with families, providing the support they need, and doing everything we can to keep families together, even in the most complex situations.
“The balance, however, of keeping families together and keeping children safe often means making tough decisions, and there are times when not all parties involved will agree with a decision, which must be grounded in the facts of the case and the best interests of the child.”
The mother’s legal team says the mother is willing and able to care for her son and there is no evidence of child protection concerns to justify his ongoing removal.
Their case will be heard by a judge in July.
Presentation hearings are supposed to happen within seven days, but the mother has been waiting months.
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