Drugs instead of tractor belts
Maybe we're being too quick to judge group home owner
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/01/2010 (5758 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
A lot of things change in 40 years, including what we consider proper child-rearing techniques.
We don’t send kids to toil in mines anymore. It’s wrong to keep them out of school to work the farm. Smacking your kid is not a good way to teach him a lesson.
Forty years ago, the young residents of a Manitoba group home were strapped with a tractor belt, made to do gruelling physical work and belittled by the home’s operator.
If you’re 50 or older, some of this will ring a bell. Times were different. Mom and Dad called the shots. We behaved or else.
I remember sitting in a corner in my kindergarten class, wearing a dunce cap. I talked during class and was put on a high stool, weeping. I was humiliated.
No one apologized. I haven’t forgotten it but it didn’t scar me for life. Neither my parents or I would have expected an apology.
But Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh apologized to those former group home residents Thursday.
According to a report issued this week by former provincial ombudsman Barry Tuckett, there was no “systemic abuse or exploitation.”
Some of the now-adult men, who are primarily aboriginal, say they were punished for speaking their own language.
Some residents allege sexual abuse at the hands of other boys, not the group home employees.
Mackintosh offered a swift apology and promised to follow through on the report’s recommendations. The residents will get grief counselling, “cultural healing” and peer support.
There was no mention of financial compensation.
The residents were sent to the group home for a variety of reasons, many of them behaviour-related. Generally, their parents handed them over.
The Cathedral Valley group home’s operator, Henry (Red) Blake, was described by some former residents as “an overbearing and intimidating man who was a firm believer in strict rules, obedience, discipline and punishment.”
Further, “it was suggested that Mr. Blake believed that structure, hard work and discipline were good for the residents in terms of character building.”
In other words, Blake was raising these boys the way so many of us were raised. He had expectations and they had to be met. He believed hard work and discipline are good for kids.
So did generations of other people.
Few today will condone smacking a child with a tractor belt. But many of us went to school at a time when the principal would routinely strap troublemakers. Most of us were spanked by our parents.
Modern thinking doesn’t allow corporal punishment in schools and it should be discouraged at home. We’ve learned that.
We’ve come up with our own substitutions. Many kids on Ritalin are being medicated into compliance. If their parents can afford it, they’re also in therapy.
We use drugs instead of tractor belts.
There were some good things said about the group home. The kids joined Scouts and were taken camping and fishing. Once a week they went to town, where they could play pool.
There is little question the group home helped many of these kids.
One of the former residents said Blake was “a great man” who kept him on the straight and narrow. He named his son after Blake.
A group of residents was severely traumatized when Blake’s wife was murdered by another resident. Some of them had called Phyllis Blake “mom.” There’s no question the slaying would have been shattering for the boys.
But there’s no possible reason for the province to apologize for a horrible crime committed by a disturbed teenager. The province didn’t shoot Phyllis Blake.
Reading the 63-page report, Red Blake comes off as a bit of a bully and, sometimes, a real jerk. He had his own ways and he followed them. He was dealing with troubled boys in the only way he knew how.
It was imperfect. Parenting always is.
Stripping a child of his language isn’t excusable. But these troubled kids were given tools for living, a mother figure and a man who taught them they were capable of coping with challenges.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for all of us who experienced trauma in our childhoods to move on and find our own way.
lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca