The Main Predictive and Intersecting Effects of out-of-Home Child Welfare Placement, Ethnicity, and Gender on Arrest in Canada

Background and Purpose: In Canada, colonialism, gender and racial discrimination, systemic racism, and related historical and present-day trauma, as well as other forms of structural violence have been identified as interrelated contributing factors to Indigenous Peoples’ overrepresentation across both the child welfare and criminal legal systems (Alberton, 2020; Fallon et al., 2021; Marques & Monchalin, 2020). To date, no studies have examined the main predictive and intersecting effects of out-of-home placement by child welfare (i.e., under state guardianship as a child), Indigenous identity, and gender on arrest in Canada. In one of few related Canadian studies, Brownell et al. (2018) found that of their Manitoban sample, nearly half of youth who had been apprehended by the child welfare system had criminal charges.

Building on this and other international work, the following hypotheses were tested using the 34^th iteration of Canada’s General Social Survey: (1) Those who have been under state guardianship will be more likely to be arrested than those who have not; (2) Indigenous Peoples will be more likely to have been arrested than White people; (3) Indigenous Peoples who have been under state guardianship will be more likely to have been arrested than others; and (4) Indigenous females who have been under state guardianship will be most likely to have been arrested.

Methods: Bivariate analyses tested the magnitude and significance of between-group differences and logistic regression models were built to test the main predictive, and two- and three-way interaction effects.

Results: All four hypotheses were supported: (1) Respondents who had been under state guardianship were more than twice as likely to have been arrested than their counterparts (OR = 2.17); (2) Indigenous Peoples were four and a half times as likely to have been arrested (OR = 4.54); (3) Indigenous Peoples who had been under state guardianship were nearly six times as likely as their White counterparts to have been arrested in the past year (OR = 5.93); and (4) Indigenous females who had been under state guardianship were more than 94 times as likely to have experienced arrest in the past year when compared to White females who had been under state guardianship (OR = 94.45). Finally, among those who had not experienced out-of-home placement, Indigenous females still faced the greatest risk of arrest. While Indigenous females who had not experienced out-of-home placement were 108% more likely to have been arrested than their female counterparts (OR = 2.08), Indigenous males faced a 59% greater risk than their male counterparts (OR = 1.59).

Conclusions and Implications: Not only was the risk of arrest elevated among all those who had been under state guardianship, this risk was greatest for Indigenous females. Evidence from the current study supports the need for culturally respectful, gender appropriate, and relevant programs and policies to reduce Indigenous Peoples’ exposure to structural violence and involvement in the child welfare system. Moreover, these findings suggest that reducing involvement in the child welfare system may reduce entanglement in the criminal legal system, especially for Indigenous females.