‘She would’ve become a mom like her own’

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This article was published 06/06/2013 (4534 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What would Phoenix Sinclair’s life be like if she hadn’t been killed by her caregivers? Research indicates she would’ve grown up to be a lot like her mom.

“Many people focused on the mom and how horrible she was. There’s no denying Phoenix lived through horrors,” Marni Brownell with the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy testified Wednesday at the inquiry into Phoenix’s death. But having studied the data for the same cohort of kids born in Manitoba around the same time as Phoenix, the odds weren’t in favour of a positive outcome for her.

“Without proper supports and based on the risk factors, she would’ve dropped out, become a teen mom, her kids would’ve been apprehended,” said the former Child Guidance Clinic psychologist, who has studied the risk factors for the maltreatment of children in care and the health and academic outcomes for high-risk youths in Manitoba.

“If Phoenix had survived, she would’ve become a mom like her own mom,” she said. “It’s predictable without the proper supports in place.”

Phoenix had three strikes against her before she was born, said Brownell, the associate professor of community health science at the University of Manitoba. Her mother was a teen when she had her first child, her family was on social assistance and had been involved with child welfare.

Her mother, Samantha Kematch, had her first baby taken into care before Phoenix was born. Kematch and Phoenix’s father, Steve Sinclair, were high school dropouts on welfare and had been involved with child welfare and were likely in need of supports they didn’t get, the inquiry has heard many times. Only 15 per cent of children with all of those risk factors will finish high school, said Brownell. Education is linked to income, which is linked to health, she said.

“In Winnipeg, almost one in three kids has one of those risk factors,” she said.

Poverty has a lot to do with it, Brownell said. Future outcomes are linked to income and they improve as income levels rise.

There is a ton of evidence early childhood programs can help alleviate the risk and break the “vicious cycle” of kids in care having kids in care, said Brownell. For every dollar spent on kids early, society saves $16 later on things such as incarceration and social spending, Brownell said.

If you don’t invest in the poor and at-risk you end up paying the consequences, she said. “They will be more likely on income assistance than contributing. They will be taking away from the economy.”

Prevention is too late for the nearly 10,000 kids already in care in Manitoba. It’s possibly the highest rate in the world, said Brownell, who has worked with researchers in other countries from Australia to the U.K. The number of kids in care here astounds them, she said.

‘It’s predictable without the proper supports in place’

— Marni Brownell with the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy

With such poor outcomes for those kids, research is needed to determine if there are better strategies such as having kids stay in the home and having a support worker there to assist the parents in parenting, she said.

Unless aboriginal people take over their own child welfare, Manitoba can expect 20,000 kids in care 20 years from now, said Leslie Spillett, executive director of Ka Ni Kanichihk Inc., an urban aboriginal social development agency. “We have to be in charge of ourselves,” said Spillett.

Most funding goes to four, big non-aboriginal agencies that serve mostly aboriginal people, said Spillett, the former clinical director at New Directions, the biggest of the four agencies. She’d prefer a “parallel development” funding model such as New Zealand’s, where indigenous Maori organizations receive 80 per cent of thefunding for Maori people, who use 80 per cent of the services.

“We dominate all the problems — child welfare, criminal justice, poor health outcomes,” she said. “Unless we dominate the solutions we are going to continue on the same way.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca