First Nations Children in the Canadian Child Welfare System: Findings From the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS-2008)

Background and Purpose: Canada's child welfare system is decentralized; it is organized under the jurisdiction of the 13 Canadian provinces/territories and a system of Aboriginal child welfare agencies which have increasing responsibility for protecting and supporting Aboriginal children. Aboriginal children are greatly overrepresented in the Canadian child welfare system and the overrepresentation is more pronounced for First Nations than for other Aboriginal groups. This current overrepresentation extends a pattern of child removal that is grounded in colonial history: the residential school system removed tens of thousands of Aboriginal children from their families and communities and the child welfare system continued with mass child removals starting in the 1960s. The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) is the only national source of data on child maltreatment investigations involving First Nations children. Conducted once every five years, the CIS collects data from a nationally representative sample of provincial/territorial child welfare agencies. The 2008 CIS also collected data in 22 of the 89 First Nations child welfare agencies in Canada; it is the first national study which presents the opportunity to examine investigations conducted by First Nations agencies. This paper explores factors contributing to the continued overrepresentation of First Nations children in Canada's child welfare system. It contrasts child, family and service response profiles for First Nations and non-Aboriginal children who come into contact with the child welfare system; it also examines the relationship between agency/community characteristics and service response profiles for First Nations children.

Methods: The CIS-2008 tracked 15,980 child maltreatment investigations conducted in a representative sample of 112 Child Welfare Service Areas, including 22 First Nations child welfare agencies, across Canada. Child welfare workers completed three-page standardized data collection forms for all cases opened in sample agencies between October 1st and December 31st, 2008. Weighted, national estimates of incidence of child maltreatment were derived based on these investigations. CIS data is used in combination with census data (aggregated to the agency level) and information about agency structure/resources in multivariate analyses which correct for the nested structure of the data.

Results: The continued overrepresentation of First Nations children is driven by neglect rather than by other forms of child maltreatment and neglect of First Nations children is associated with family/household factors including substance abuse, poverty and poor housing. Further analyses examine the relationship between community/agency level characteristics - such as community size, type (reserve/non-reserve), and remoteness - and service profiles.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings highlight the structural drivers of First Nations child maltreatment, speaking to the importance of resources for preventative and community-based support services for First Nations children and families. Findings are particularly salient in the Canadian context, where a pending human rights complaint alleges that the federal government systematically underfunds child welfare services in reserve communities. They are also relevant to an American context in which the federal government has recently provided incentives for Native American communities to share child welfare data similar to that collected by the CIS.