Man tells tale of ‘child welfare tragedy’

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This article was published 27/04/2022 (1590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CODY SELLAR

STAFF REPORTER

CORYDON

A Corydon-area resident is speaking out about his experience in child welfare after decades coming to terms with his childhood.

He said he wanted to finally speak out “so people would know there’s other people out there in this ordeal.”

Almost 40 years after the day, the cold still bites his hands harder than most. It’s the lingering effect of frostbitten skin, from the time Arthur Kobar, then 13, broke open the door that locked him into the now-defunct Seven Oaks Youth Centre and ran out into the frozen air of Boxing Day 1984.

“I just wanted out. I was tired of sleeping in it. I didn’t think about the weather,” Kobar said. “They almost wanted to cut (my hands) off. That’s the best way to put it.”

Kobar said he recently got an infection in his hand, another reminder of how his hands have been weakened by the incident. But it’s less the physical pain that bothers Kobar, it’s what the pain represents.

He’d been a ward of the Children’s Aid Society. In his youth, he was moved from place to place, ragdolled by the tides of adult society. His social worker called it “a cliché from the pages of child welfare tragedy.”

He ended up in the foster home of Paul Bryson. According to a Winnipeg Sun article describing Bryson’s crimes against Kobar, Bryson sexually assaulted Kobar up to 50 times between November 1982 and September 1984, when Kobar informed a guidance councillor what was happening. Bryson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

It was under these circumstances that Kobar was placed in the Seven Oaks Youth Centre. The centre was often used as a temporary placement while other arrangements were made. But Kobar was only 13. All he knew was that he’d been harmed, and as a result, he was being put into a locked facility.

“I tried to say, why am I here and not out there, in the public?” Kobar said. He felt as though he was being jailed, just like his abuser, as though he’d done something wrong. Kobar said this feeling left a lasting impression.

From when Kobar was removed from Bryson’s home to when Kobar was discharged from his wardship — a period of six years — he was moved from one place to another almost 20 times, according to documents from Winnipeg Child and Family Services.

After his wardship, he found himself floating about without support of any kind. He ended up living on the streets for a time, caught up in drugs and petty crime. Eventually, he spent six months in jail for assaulting a security guard.

“I did that, and I’m not going to debate it. I did deserve to go to jail,” Kobar said. “And it gave me the time to actually say, I hate myself. Why can’t I love myself. And that was something that was crucial to me.”

He got clean and scraped together money gathering cans to recycle. He volunteered at Hands of Hope. Eventually, he ended up as a participant at Oshki-Giizhig. Wanting to put together the shards of his fractured past, he and his social worker set out to obtain a record of his time in care.

Once the pair had submitted to get that information, it took over a year to receive it, and only then after they threatened to take the delay to the press, said Mark Granger, Kobar’s social worker at Oshki-Giizhig, an Indigenous-based organization that supports people with various disorders by providing housing and social programming.

“It’s outrageous … it’s just one more barrier for folks like Arthur or people in similar circumstances to get some closure to help them process,” he said.