Inequities in child protective services contact among First Nations and non-First Nations parents in one Canadian province: a retrospective population-based study
This new report spans a 20 year period in Manitoba where child welfare open a case file for 1 in 27 non-First Nations parents - but open case files found their way to 1 in 2 First Nations parents in the same time period. Not surprisingly, this has had detrimental health impacts on those parents and their ability to bring the children home. Kathleen Kenny’s research once again shines a light…
Background
Parental contact with child protective services (CPS) has been linked to deteriorating health among parents. Capturing rates of CPS contact among parents is therefore important for understanding inequities in exposure and their potential role in amplifying racial inequities in health and wellbeing. Though an extensive body of research in North America has provided population-level analyses of CPS contact among children, a disproportionate percentage of whom are Indigenous, no studies to date have extrapolated estimates to account for contact in parent populations, leading to a fragmented view of the system’s reach and impact beyond the child-level. In order to advance health equity-oriented research in this domain, our study calculated previously unexplored population-level estimates of CPS contact among First Nations and non-First Nations parents.
Results
Overall, 49.6% of First Nations parents had a CPS file open for their child(ren) (vs. 13.1% among non-First Nations parents), 27.4% had out-of-home placement of their child(ren) (vs. 4.7% among non-First Nations parents), and 9.6% experienced TPR (vs. 1.8% among non-First Nations parents).
Conclusions
CPS contact was high among parents and prevalence was almost 4 times higher among First Nations parents, where 1 out of 2 were intervened upon by CPS. Findings reinforce significant concerns about the system’s scope and the crucial importance of considering its role in compounding health inequities and sustaining colonialism in Canada. First Nations-led interventions are needed to reduce CPS disruption to the lives of First Nations peoples.
