Ontario’s most vulnerable youths are being “retraumatized” by child protection and justice systems that set them up to fail and leave them languishing for months in pretrial detention, according to researchers who tracked kids in the care of foster parents and group homes.

The research team — co-led by Judge Brian Scully of the Ontario Court of Justice and Ryerson professor Judy Finlay — followed youths in care who were also involved with the justice system, including 28 youths in Toronto.

During the project’s two-year period, the Toronto youths spent an average of 138 days in detention awaiting trial, due to systemic barriers that make obtaining bail difficult and reoffending easy. Nine of the 28 youths spent one to six months in pretrial detention; eight spent more than six months.

The longest pretrial detention suffered by one youth was 455 days served in two stints, including one of 401 consecutive days. The youth was already in detention for an unknown amount of time before researchers began their tracking.

Project researcher Jessica Salerno followed the youth, whom she referred to with the pronoun “they.” She co-ordinated conferences with key players involved in the case and witnessed a system that broke the youth’s spirit.

“Towards the end, they were really sad,” Salerno says in an interview. “They just didn’t care anymore … They didn’t care about life and they didn’t care what happened to them.”

Researchers found the challenge was especially acute for Indigenous or Black youths sent to group homes far from their communities, where their culture isn’t reflected. Another researcher on the team identified the long-detained youth as a Black male.

Sixteen of the 28 Toronto youths (57 per cent) were Black. That’s higher than the overrepresentation seen in Children’s Aid Society of Toronto data. Black youth represent just 13.6 per cent of city residents under 18.

The Black youths spent longer in pretrial detention than any other racial or ethnic group tracked — 200 days, on average. White youths spent an average of 75 days; Indigenous youth spent about 40 days. The project also found that Black youth incurred more severe charges, on average, than other groups.

“Many of the Black youth the project engaged with experienced the classic ‘child-welfare-to-prison pipeline,’ ” says a report issued by the research team, which partly blames the longer detention on “institutional anti-Black racism and colonialism within the child welfare and youth justice systems.”

Researchers call the children and teens they followed “cross-over youth,” because they start in the child protection system and end up in the youth justice one.

They witnessed what numerous reports have criticized for creating that pipeline: group home staff untrained to deal with traumatized youth; youths charged for acting out their trauma; children’s aid societies refusing to act as sureties; lawyers insensitive to the struggles youths face in the child protection system; and unreasonable bail conditions that inevitably get broken, thereby triggering further charges.

“Once they’re in the justice system, they go deeper and deeper into it,” says Finlay, a professor at Ryerson’s School of Child and Youth Care. She was Ontario’s child advocate from 1991 to 2007, an office Premier Doug Ford’s government abolished.

In a statement to the Star, Jill Dunlop, associate minister of children and women’s issues, said the government is deep into a process of reviewing and “modernizing” child welfare. The work includes “looking holistically at the different systems children and youth may interact with, including the intersection between child welfare and youth justice systems.” The goal is to divert them from criminal behaviour through education and prevention programs, she added.

“Any time a child in care is remanded to custody, we see it as a failure,” Dunlop said, adding that reforms by the previous Liberal government resulted in a 78 per cent reduction in youths admitted to custody and detention, to an average of 150 a year. She did not say how many of those are cross-over youth.

The researchers set up pilot projects at four sites — Toronto, Belleville, Thunder Bay and Brantford — funded by the federal and Ontario governments, and the Laidlaw Foundation.

Along with tracking youths, researchers held case management conferences with key groups, including police, Crown attorneys, judges, children’s aid workers and group home staff. The goal was to have everyone change the practices that funnel youths in care deep into the justice system.

Most of the data in the team’s 208-page report, “Cross-Over Youth Project: Navigating Quicksand,” comes from 48 youths — 12 to 17 years old — tracked in the Toronto and Belleville pilot projects. Most of them — 64 per cent — had ended up in care not because they needed protection, but because they didn’t get along with their parents. That highlights the need for early intervention to resolve conflicts and keep families intact, the report notes.

Ontario’s child protection system serves a monthly average of 12,600 children and youths taken from abusive or neglectful parents and placed in foster or group homes. Fifty children’s aid societies — 12 of them are Indigenous agencies — receive $1.5 billion annually in provincial funding to care for these children, and to help many more who remain with their families.

Of the 48 kids in Toronto and Belleville, a majority — 67 per cent — were charged while living in group homes, usually within the first 30 days of arriving.

“Group care settings at both sites acted as a gateway into the youth justice system by criminalizing the trauma of cross-over youth served by the project,” the report says.

Youths were usually charged for going AWOL or acting out their trauma, the researchers found. Their report says poorly trained group home staff failed to recognize defiant, disruptive or aggressive behaviours as expressions of pain and called police when “neither the staff nor the young person (was) in danger.”

Group home caregivers “depend on police for de-escalation and crisis intervention,” the report says.

“This emphasis on police for managing behaviour and subsequent instability is particularly catastrophic for Black and Indigenous young people,” it adds. “There exists a culture of racism within the group care system that allows these young people to be mistreated at higher rates than their non-racialized peers.”

The Ministry of Children and Community and Social Services funded the development of a “conflict resolution guide” for group home caregivers, designed to prevent escalations requiring police involvement, said Hannah Anderson, a spokesperson for Dunlop. And last year, more than 1,000 residential care workers completed a free introductory course on trauma-informed training offered by the Child and Parent Resource Institute, she added.

The ministry has backed the development of a system-wide, anti-Black racism approach in child protection. It’s also developing “comprehensive” quality-of care standards for the child welfare sector. The cross-over youth report notes the ministry has been making that promise since at least 2017 and “there has yet to be any progress on the implementation of these changes.”

Once the cross-over youth are detained, the obstacles multiply.

Most of those followed by the project’s researchers were Crown wards, which means the province is their parent, and children’s aid societies are responsible for their care. But societies refuse to act as sureties, forcing youths to stay in detention while new plans of care are designed to satisfy requirements for bail, the report says.

“If you ask these kids they say, ‘This is the only time I actually needed my CAS worker and they couldn’t help me,’ ” says Salerno, who used to be a child protection worker.

Given the project’s findings, the ministry is considering whether children’s aid societies should act as sureties and accept the legal responsibilities, Anderson said.

The researchers saw defence lawyers and Crown attorneys with little understanding of the behavioural effects of trauma or the struggles youths face in the child protection system. Many youths get shuffled through multiple foster or group homes. Researchers found one youth in Thunder Bay who lived in 120 different places while in care.

Often, a new placement for a detained youth must be found because the group home where they lived won’t take them back or a bail condition makes their return impossible — for example, if police decide a youth can’t have contact with another resident they’re accused of assaulting.

“In that case, there’s no possibility of the group home taking him back even if they want to,” Judge Scully says in an interview, adding police have so far largely refused to consider ways of ensuring a victim’s safety without making the accused youth homeless.

The youths sit in detention during the slow process of finding a new home.

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Levi, 18, experienced the frustrating process after he was taken into care at the age of 12. Levi wasn’t one of the cross-over youths tracked in the pilot projects. He spoke to the Star because he is part of Youth Peer Mentors, a John Howard Society group that helped cross-over youth in the Belleville project and took part in the case management conferences. The Star is identifying him only by his first name.

He was placed in a home in Toronto, far from friends and family in Tweed, north of Belleville. He wasn’t permitted to visit his family, so one day, when he was 13, he took a vehicle belonging to the group home and drove himself to Tweed. He says he was charged with theft of a motor vehicle, theft under $5,000, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and fleeing from police.

The group home didn’t want him back, and he says children’s aid rejected a request from his grandmother to obtain custody. So he spent a month at an Oshawa detention centre until a new group home for him could be found. “I spent my birthday there,” he says.

Salerno watched the frustration of youths grow as they waited for bail at the Roy McMurtry Youth Centre in Brampton or other sites. They inevitably clashed with correctional officers untrained to deal with troubled youths and got into fights with other young inmates.

“So they get charged again and that makes it more difficult for them to get bail on the initial charge,” Salerno says. “It’s like a vicious circle.”

When they finally emerge from detention, bail conditions can sometimes deprive youths of needed services. Bail often imposes counselling sessions and, with charges like assault, prohibits contact with the victim. But small communities might have only one psychologist, and if the victim also needs the service, both youths can’t be accommodated.

Researchers also found that freedom on bail is short-lived. Typical bail conditions order youths to respect rigid group home rules, which caregivers zealously uphold.

“Often, group homes would call the police when their youth, on bail or probation, were even a minute late for curfew,” the report states.

“Group care operators and staff indicated that they felt bound by the Children’s Aid Societies’ policy that required them to call the police. They felt they would be held liable if they did not report a ‘missing’ youth immediately. Police expressed frustration with this policy, but almost always charged the youth when they were called to respond.”

Youths then get charged with failing to comply with bail conditions, and Salerno’s “vicious circle” resumes — further detention, the slow process of developing a new care plan and new bail conditions, more charges while in detention and, once released, more charges for failing to comply.

During the project’s two-year period, the 28 Toronto youth the researchers followed incurred an astounding 416 charges — 151 of them for violating bail conditions.

“Breaching bail conditions was the primary source of recidivism across all (project) sites,” the report states.

In Levi’s case, he was placed on two years’ probation, which required him to uphold group home rules. Even his probation officer, he says, found that condition unreasonable “because you could be breached for not making your bed.”

Levi says he was sexually assaulted dozens of times by a staff member at his group home. He says he “shut down completely” and kept the abuse to himself, but eventually began breaking curfew and staying away from the home whenever the staff member was on shift. He was charged with breaching his probation.

“I sometimes think the world’s upside down,” says Levi, adding that his children’s aid worker and staff at the group home never asked him about the reasons for his behaviour.

“I think if a staff member came to me and said, ‘Hey, Levi, what’s going on? Why are you AWOLing all the time? Can we help you in some way?’ I think I would have told them about the sexual assault that was happening,” he says.

Levi says he wasn’t sent back to detention for breaking probation, thanks largely to strong support from the provincial child advocate’s office. But he ended up being shuffled from group home to group home — 14 in one year.

“I felt that everybody else thought they knew what was best for me, and my opinion didn’t really matter,” Levi says, noting he and others like him quickly get labelled as “troubled and high-risk youth.”

Levi began living on his own at 16, and soon ended up homeless on the streets of Toronto. He experimented with a hard drug, and it scared him. He moved back to Tweed, lived with his mother for a while, got a job, fell in love and volunteered with the United Way. The John Howard Society noticed his talents and offered him a job as a youth mentor.

Researchers don’t know what happened to the 48 youths they were tracking after the two-year project ended. Other studies on cross-over youth have found that many end up in the adult prison system.

The researchers developed protocols and best practices for key players in the child protection and justice system, all designed to break the child-welfare-to-prison pipeline.

Recommendations include more reasonable bail conditions, trauma-informed training for group home caregivers, “anti-oppressive” practices, the use of restorative justice, and encouraging police to simply caution youths in care when called for an incident or send them to “diversion” programs — to help with mental health problems, for example — rather than lay charges.

The case conference approach used in Belleville — where lawyers, child welfare workers, police and judges co-ordinated efforts in specific cases — resulted in a significant drop in the number of youths ending up in court. The ministry says it’s now supporting a similar pilot project in Peel region.

In an interview, Finlay says much would change if police, child protection workers, group home staff and lawyers recognized the trauma and vulnerability of cross-over youth.

“These young people get hardened,” she says, “because people look at them as criminals.”