Equity and anti-oppression in child welfare

In order to achieve equity and change practices to support positive outcomes for all children, youth, and families, it's important to understand what oppression is and how it plays out in the child welfare system. 

Oppression refers to the use of power by one group to disempower, marginalize, or exert dominance over another group. Dominant groups can maintain their status, privilege, and power over others both intentionally and unintentionally as well as in obvious and subtle ways. Acts of oppression can become institutionalized or systemic, thus becoming hidden and seemingly ‘normal’. They can also play out on the personal and interpersonal levels, influencing individual values, beliefs, and actions as well as interactions between people.

Oppression can take many forms. Types of oppression in Canadian society and impacting child welfare include but are not limited to ableism, anti-Semitism, classism, colonization, heterosexism, Islamophobia, racism, sexism, and transphobia. Because people have multiple intersecting sites of marginalized identities, they may have to deal with multiple forms of oppression. This is why oppression needs to be discussed alongside the concept of intersectionality.

Just as there are many types of oppression, there are also many types of privilege, for example, white privilege, class privilege, and male privilege. Privilege refers to the unearned power and advantages that members of the dominant group receive as a direct result of the oppression and marginalization experienced by individuals who are not considered members of the dominant group. As such, privilege can be understood as the flip side of oppression, as explained in the video below:

The child welfare system continues to be implicated in the oppression experienced by marginalized groups in society, including African Canadians, immigrants and refugees, Indigenous people, LGBTQ2S+ people, low-income people, people with disabilities and mental health issues, racialized people, and single-mother families.

While the specific needs and issues faced by these marginalized groups vary, their shared experience of child welfare is 'marginal' in that it does not reflect the dominant or mainstream experience which is centred within the system (and in the larger social context) and embedded in the beliefs and biases held by child welfare professionals. The result is that service users who do not reflect or hold the same values and norms as the dominant group are defined as 'different‘ and those differences are perceived as 'inferior.' 

For example, low-income families that provide a caring home for their children may still be substantiated for child maltreatment because the experience of poverty can often look like neglect to the eyes of someone from a middle-class upbringing. Loving LGBTQ2S+ families with diverse configurations that go beyond the nuclear family, include non-biological connections, and look different from heterosexual and cisgendered family structures may be seen as deviant or unstable. European worldviews of racial and cultural superiority have historically, and continue to be, responsible for the removal of Indigenous children from their communities and families.

Learning about oppression – specifically how certain groups are disadvantaged and disproportionately impacted by the child welfare system, and how workers, as representatives of the system, can unconsciously and sometimes consciously misuse their power and privilege when working with children, youth, and families – is therefore key to disrupting the marginalization of these groups and to integrating equity into practice and thinking.

While equity and anti-oppressive practice (AOP) in child welfare are concerned with providing equitable outcomes for all children, youth, and families, OACAS recognizes that not all Indigenous communities agree with or support equity and AOP frameworks, and that distinct approaches are required when working within an Indigenous context. This is because Indigenous peoples are not just seeking equity, but also additional unique rights as described in the statement below from the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

"It is important to note that Indigenous peoples understand themselves as peoples or nations, not as racial or ethnic groups. There are many consequences that flow from this distinction, including Indigenous peoples’ rights to land and rights to self-determination, which includes rights to self-government. These rights have been recognized at the international level through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. To respect these distinct entitlements, Indigenous peoples must be distinguished from other communities and recognized as unique. We encourage CASs, government and others to clearly recognize Indigenous peoples as distinct peoples and nations when considering data collection and other aspects of service delivery."

-From the 2018 report Interrupted childhoods: Over-representation of Indigenous and Black children in Ontario child welfare.