I was just reviewing this story on CBC website -- http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/mother-of-teen-who-died-in-cfs-care-wants-answers-1.4501229
Tells of another child in care dying. This time by suicide.
The portion of the article that made me really shake my head in disbelief is this...
"According to a report by the Children's Advocate of Manitoba, 13 children died in CFS care last year. Four of the deaths were of natural causes, three were accidental, four were "undetermined," and two were suicides."
Unless I am missing something -- these numbers are NOT accurate OR the crisis in the CFS system in British Columbia is absolutely insane. There was something like 160+ children who died in care in 2016 according to earlier reports I posted about... That was in BC. I need to do some investigating into WHY there is such a gross discrepancy between the number of children who are dying in care in Manitoba, vs that number of children who are dying in care in British Columbia.
I have managed to convince a friend of mine who is also a journalist and works as an editor to come to steemit recently. I am hoping to also convince him to join the Pursuance Project on this issue (via the work of journalist Barrett Brown) -- We will see if he has an interest in working with me on this issue. I think he will. He was also briefly in Foster Care when he was a teenager.
What concerns me is either the numbers we are hearing or CBC is reporting are grossly misreported.. or the crisis in BC is even worse than I imagined. I suspect that the number of children who are dying in foster care should be roughly the same across the country... unless one particular province's department of Children and Family services is somehow grossly dysfunctional... AND if there is a wide disparity between different provinces then they should be sharing knowledge and resources to help the provinces that are having more problems improve on what they are doing.
I wish I could spend more time on this -- I do have google alerts set up to read this kind of news every day and I have a lot of friends who also crowd-source this sort of news for me so I keep abreast of what's happening...
But I suspect we are being lied to about the number of children in care, the quality of care they are getting and how many children are dying or being injured or abused in care.
Anyways.... just a brief note on this. I had my employment program today which had me going from 7:30 AM and I just got home half an hour ago... and I am wiped out right now. I will let you know when my friend (who can help me with structuring the journalism project/investigation) gets onto steemit... and I will introduce him to the group when that happens.
ALSO.. the employment program I am taking is an introduction to film making training so I am hopefully going to get some work experience in film production so that we will be able to produce the journalism pursuit of this subject with multi-media... I doubt very much that the mainstream media will be interested in this story... but I think it will be good to at least do the research for alternative and independent journalistic pursuits.
That's all for tonight. Take care!