The latest case of an indigenous baby apprehended by Manitoba's Child and Family Services comes with it's own video, streamed to Facebook by a family member. The viral video has of course sparked a commensurate outrage among the general public, as these things tend to do, and has probably reached many people who would not normally read a dense unvarnished article in the Globe and Mail (or even a short inflammatory one in the Star or Sun).
And, yes, it is affecting, even blurred out for anonymity. It is accompanied by pithy quotes from elders, along the lines of "we want to take back our babies because they belong to us", and expressions of anger and outrage from family members.
I am not trying to make light of the situation, which is clearly dire - 90% of the babies in care in Manitoba are indigenous, and such apprehensions happens an extraordinary once a day on average in Manitoba - there is obviously a major problem here, and in Manitoba in particular. The challenge is identifying just what that problem actually is.
What has never occurred to me before is that these events only ever reveal to the general public one side of the story. There must be another side, there always is. The story that is not being told is that of the police and the family services agencies. In this particular case, we are told vaguely that the baby was apprehended because the mother arrived drunk at the hospital to give birth, a scenario that family members dispute.
It seems to me that the family services people - who do what most be one of the crappiest and most stressful jobs imaginable, for little pay and recognition - do not intervene unless they absolutely have to, especially as they know that they are likely to be lambasted and pilloried in the press, or at least in the indigenous community, for their actions. They clearly do not do these things lightly, frivolously or sadistically. They are public servants serving the common good as best they are able, and they are privy to information and background details that we are outsiders and press members not usually privy to. They are acting to save babies from what they deem to be a worse fate than being separated from their birth parents, probably involving a sorry story of alcohol, drugs, addiction and domestic violence.
But we never hear their side of the story, I assume because of the legal and privacy legislation that must surround their line of work. The indigenous families, on the other hand, do get their stories out, at least sometimes, and even if they cannot be named for legal reasons, which is why we have the popular narrative of a broken child welfare system enacting systematic racism on a native population.
Now, maybe that narrative is correct (I'm sure it is correct in the minds of the complainants). Or maybe what needs fixing is not the child welfare system, but the underlying causes of native addiction and family violence. Without both sides of the story we will probably never know. And maybe it is even right that we should not know. We pay agencies like the police and child and family services to deal with the seamy side of life that we don't want to deal with ourselves. These organizations come with a set of checks and balances developed over decades by the best sociological and psychological minds, and they are not by nature racist and untrustworthy.
So, before we blithely accept one narrative or another, let's remember that we are only getting one side of the story here.
UPDATE
A little bit more information has surfaced since. It seems that the mother in the case had unsuccessfully been treated for addiction, and had used cocaine in the last three months of her pregnancy. She had also specifically asked about having family care the child.
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