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This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is

This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves. Indigenous, orphans, those "born out of wedlock" in the old days, any child prised loose from the family is at tremendous risk of physical abuse, sexual molestation, death, and discarding. I'm not sure what it says about the human race in general but it isn't very cheery.

dade_ 5y ago
These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work. These stories are uncovering the horrors described by the survivors that were generally ignored until recently. We will never be perfect, but we can keep trying to be better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  I think OP agrees with you and is trying to say that the tendency of us to prefer institutions over families can lead to this. For example, I know when I was a kid the school teachers and people were constantly worried about me and my family since we're immigrants from a part of the world they thought of as "backwards". We did not have liberal social views, and my parents opted me out of sex ed, LGBT events, etc. One time I mentioned a comic strip (Calvin & Hobbes) in which the kid dreamed of flying an F-14 with a team of T-Rex pilots to blow up his school because he really didn't want to attend and I was called in for some government program to prevent terrorism and they asked me all sorts of questions about how violent my parents are and did I believe in violence as a tool to solve problems, etc. Sometimes our tendency is to "civilize" children when we think parents aren't doing that. What OP and you are trying to say is that what parents and family offer (accountability, care for the child, etc.) is usually better than any "values" an institution can impart onto a child. Institutions can often be cold and cruel in a way few parents ever are, and so the tendency to lean on institutions with regards to molding children is one we should avoid unless absolutely necessary.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  The government would have never let the Church (run schools) take responsibility for the kids if the Church wasn't mistreating them like this. They would have just run their own abusive boarding schools. Slow moving genocide and generally treating these populations like crap to the point where they chose to forgo their culture was the whole point.
  - DanHulton 5y ago
    I was about to disagree with you, when my brain finally made sense of the double negative in that first paragraph. So I figured I'd just leave a comment to that effect to save anyone else the same potential mistake. In short, above is saying that the abuse and neglect was a feature, not a bug, as far as the government was concerned, and is absolutely correct.
- refurb 5y ago
  The whole system makes a lot more sense if you imagine it through the belief in the “white man’s burden” at the time - it was the white man’s responsibility to educate and assimilate “inferior” cultures into the “superior” Western system. Not to excuse the damage done, but the people doing these things felt like it was their moral responsibility - if they didn’t do it, these cultures would forever be stuck in their inferior ways. That attitude hasn’t disappeared.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >That attitude hasn’t disappeared. It's undergone a very successful rebranding and PR campaign.
    - andai 5y ago
      To what?
      - dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
        https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
      - refurb 5y ago
        Woke politics.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Yes, and this is the most difficult form of racism to recognize and avoid. Hatred is easy to recognize. Racism without hatred is often discounted. It’s the people with good intentions who are acting with inherent biases and preconceived world-views who often commit acts of blatant racism without anyone realizing until it’s too late.
    - behnamoh 5y ago
      I find it odd that some Christian conservatives in the US support policies which are essentially racist. I had a talk with my girlfriend about it and she mentioned one reason could be that they actually think they're doing the right thing according to the Bible. It's true that religion/belief-system "partitions" people -- you're either one of us or we must be against you. Not saying that some (supposedly) Christians aren't taking advantage of religion to justify their agenda, but many actually believe what they're doing is right. It's also difficult to change this situation because for many people maintaining homeostasis is much easier and more favorable than opening up their minds to other opinions. Many religious people (not just Christians) I've known just want to follow a set of "rules" and have a simple standard life.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  In at least Ireland, not all of the children were abandoned either. Quite a few were guilty of being born out of wedlock. Luckily Ireland has cast aside the influence of the Catholic church these days.
- samstave 5y ago
  and then there is the 'conspiracy theory' about the queen of england going to canada to see a bunch of children who later went missing.... Elite pedophiles are a real thing. Abuses such as this are a real thing. Also, anyone who calls them self a 'royal' can just go fuck themselves. They're kleptocracy and thats all there is to them.
- beloch 5y ago
  Hunter-gatherer societies across the world have, historically, fared poorly when agricultural or pastoral societies have moved into their territory. Complete extermination (i.e. genocide) or complete assimilation is the rule, not the exception. Such genocides happened all over the world but have mostly passed out of living memory with the winners preferring not to be reminded of them. This didn't happen in Canada for several reasons. Most native tribes, especially in the West, were not crushed militarily, as they were in the U.S.. The crown and most tribes signed treaties. While what was going on South of the border was, no doubt, instructive, it's to both sides' credit that they looked for a peaceful way to coexist. The terms of those treaties remain controversial today but, nonetheless, they put Canada's natives on fundamentally different footing than almost any other overrun hunter-gatherer societies in human history. They had an established, legal right to continue existing. It's incredibly difficult for us, today, to understand the state of affairs that existed just after these treaties were signed. Native tribes were not peacefully co-existing, stagnant populations that had existed in the same spot for thousands of years. They moved around, bumped into each other, struggled to defend territories, had wars, raided each other. Raiding was so honoured and economically important in some tribe's cultures that even other native tribes did not want to be their neighbours. A big part of why so many tribes were eager to sign treaties with the Crown was that the Crown was promising security. They wouldn't have to continually fight other tribes to keep their sources of food secure. The Crown proved to be a less than completely secure food source themselves at first, but that's another discussion. When we, today, talk about the desire of leaders such as John A Macdonald to "kill the Indian in the child", we find this atrocious. We respect diversity of religion and culture. However, at the time of John A Macdonald, native culture presented real problems. It was actually progressive for the time to think that natives could be as productive as any other Canadian citizens if they could be educated to adopt European economic pursuits and abandon cultural practices, such as raiding, that were wholly incompatible with the peace and order the Crown promised its citizens, native and European alike. There were those, at the time, who still espoused outright genocide. There remain, even today, places in the world where outright genocide is pursued actively. The residential schools are a painful part of history that is still, very much, in raw living memory. However, we must look at the big picture too. In almost any other place and time in history, native cultures would already be utterly extirpated. They still exist and thrive in Canada and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to do so. How many other times in history have cultures so alien to each other managed to coexist? There remain many problems to tackle, but hope for the future is well justified based on Canada's past.
gchamonlive 5y ago
> when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment I don't follow your logic leap. You exampled a lot of incidents with institutions but that only, in the best case advocates for institutions being nasty, not family, because it doesn't account for abuse within a family context. Is it quantifiably greater in institutions? We can't answer that by the information provided.
- tw04 5y ago
  The average family doesn't have a child buried in their yard. So yes I think we can say with confidence these institutions were and are quantifiably worse.
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical.
    - tw04 5y ago
      > The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical. I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The average residential school does. That's why they're looking. The estimate was 6000 dead children across Canada and they expect that's low. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of-history-residential-schools https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of... > As many as 6,000 children died in residential institutions, which ran from 1876 to 1996. >The accurate figure could be much higher however, since the government stopped recording aboriginal students’ deaths in 1920 in light of the alarming statistics.
      - Xylakant 5y ago
        Residential schools are a special case compared to other institutions, though. They were deliberately created to destroy indigenous communities. The cruelty was not an aberration, it was part of the system.
Retric 5y ago
Child abuse and neglect by parents is also something that exists. It’s easy to see problems, but context and improvements are much more difficult. The US removed sanitariums due to serious issues, but the situation didn’t improve instead dumping the mentality ill into the prison and homeless populations. Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems? That’s the kind of analysis that’s difficult yet essential for actual improvement.
- batch12 5y ago
  > Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems I can say anecdotally that being in a foster home was a much better experience than being in group homes. I am sure experiences vary, but I went from feeling like I was a prisioner in group homes to a family in a foster home.
  - Retric 5y ago
    To be clear, I truly believe the median foster homes is better than the median group home. Unfortunately the variance is the problem, with some foster homes and some group homes being truly abusive.
- tremon 5y ago
  Ultimately, group homes are operating a business. The people running such homes are working there, not necessarily living there. That means the adults don't need to form an emotional bond with the children, while the children do need to form emotional bonds with the adults for their development. That mismatch doesn't exist in foster homes, foster parents are much more likely to invest in foster children (both emotionally and financially) than group home caregivers are. To take a very blunt IT analogy, it's a cattle vs pets distinction.
  - Retric 5y ago
    That’s one way of separating things, however the literature is surprisingly mixed on the topic. EX: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838017726427 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380177264...
elliekelly 5y ago
It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.
- garyrichardson 5y ago
  While that may be true, it’s only part of the situation here. Residential schools in Canada were part of a system by the gov of Canada to eliminate/assimilate the First Nations people. Many argue this was genocide.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    The slash between "eliminate" and "assimilate" is doing a lot of work. It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". You're right regarding the history, of course. Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other. Well, both are sad anyway.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". “Killing a people” is genocide. “Killing people” is murder, mass murder if it is lots of people. The latter is sometimes part of the mechanism by which the former is achieved, but there aren’t “two different meanings of ‘genocide’” involved.
      - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
        > “Killing a people” is genocide. But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media. Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"? Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group? A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.
foolmeonce 5y ago
> Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves. Families are not particularly safe. Systems that pulled children from their family for placement in a "correct" family created similar horror stories and the natural families of many are also horror stories. Air crashes are more notable than auto-crashes despite being less likely per passenger. Similarly, even if institutions fail at 1/10th the rate of placement in families, notable news will still paint us the opposite picture.
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  Is this actually true that families are less or equivalently as safe as institutional living though? At least one study found that rates of abuse in foster homes are ~4x higher than in other homes.
- wyager 5y ago
  Biological family are the only people in the world who manifestly have real “skin in the game” with respect to ensuring the proper treatment of their children. For almost everyone else, especially in institutional settings, there are always other considerations that come before the welfare of individual children.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  I am not disagreeing with you on families. My point is about oversight, and graves. Here, recently, we had a case of some missing kids where the children were killed and buried in the back yard. The difference is that there was a swiftness in catching them. Or that little girl that was starved to death by her parents near to me -- again, caught. When it is an institution, there are no external checks on that institution, and so you get these mass graves and by the time people clue in, the perpetrators are dead. My point is that if you're the one auditing your own books, you can get away with a lot, for a long long time, and sometimes that means retiring with having gotten away with it.
wsc981 5y ago
When I moved to Thailand, I got into contact with a Dutch national of Jewish decent. We occasionally meet over coffee and have a little chat. When he was young, after WW2, he lived in several foster homes spread over Europe and managed by nuns. He told me he often had to sexually pleasure the nuns in order to get some extra food. His parents were not able to care for him in this period, but eventually he got back with his parents. He told me he doesn't look back in anger over that time period though. As far as he knew it was the same in most other foster homes.
kellyarne 5y ago
It's similar to the "contract children" or "indentured child laborers" scandal in Switzerland[1], for children born out of wedlock, which continued until 1960. It's amazing how the same story keeps repeating in many countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdingkinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdingkinder
j45 5y ago
It’s dangerous to comment on this article without knowing what residential schools were. Children were forcibly taken from their families by the Canadian government for no other reason than the families they were born into.. to be converted to a different culture and faith and endured horrific abuses across the board in every residential school. A good place to learn why these children specifically suffered, and how monstrously wrong it was (some schools operated into the 1980s and 1990s) is the Truth and reconciliation commission that took place in Canada. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060... http://www.trc.ca/ http://www.trc.ca/
xphilter 5y ago
Leave it to HN to once again take an explicitly racist program (kidnap indigenous kids so as to “civilize” them) and make it seem race neutral.
AbrahamParangi 5y ago
> it has less to do with indigenous children This is a very strong claim to make about cultural genocide: that the children’s race was incidental to the destruction.
twodave 5y ago
And yet one of the less-emphasized progressive tenets is the destruction of the family, because (e.g. in Marxism) the “family” is part of the bourgeoisie and must be abolished along with them.
SZJX 5y ago
This said, some children are genuinely better off in the hands of some state-sponsored foster care (especially more modern ones) than in the hands of some neglectful/abusive parents. I have always been of the opinion that being a parent is a job that requires certain skills just like any other, and not everybody is well-qualified to do the job well, while the traditional society puts pressure on everybody to take the job regardless, which could be very dangerous. The problem with the abuses that we're discussing, as described by somebody down the chain, could be that the church and the foster care institutes are set up in a way so that they are already designated as "special" from the get go. I still don't know if that what's described in Brave New World, i.e. every child in the whole society being raised collectively, is such a bad idea. The author's apparent derision and demonization of such an idea was the most jarring part when I read the book. In fact, many studies have proposed that the whole idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" is a quite recent invention, or at least is something that was not shared by all hunter-gatherer societies, many of which did raise their children as a group. In fact one could well argue that the strict adherence to monogamy and to one nuclear family is contrary to the human nature, which the incredibly high rate of divorce in the modern society seems to support to a certain degree. Ironically, the very idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" seems to be something heavily promoted, even enshrined, by the Christian religions, which themselves committed such atrocious crimes on children. I guess my main point is, your position seems to be one that emphasizes the importance of "family", while I've always been wary of the idea of elevation of "marriage" and "family" as something of a doctrine, even sacred and not subject to any debate. This idea has always sounded very traditional and potentially irrational to me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dade_ 5y ago

These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work. These stories are uncovering the horrors described by the survivors that were generally ignored until recently. We will never be perfect, but we can keep trying to be better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I think OP agrees with you and is trying to say that the tendency of us to prefer institutions over families can lead to this. For example, I know when I was a kid the school teachers and people were constantly worried about me and my family since we're immigrants from a part of the world they thought of as "backwards". We did not have liberal social views, and my parents opted me out of sex ed, LGBT events, etc. One time I mentioned a comic strip (Calvin & Hobbes) in which the kid dreamed of flying an F-14 with a team of T-Rex pilots to blow up his school because he really didn't want to attend and I was called in for some government program to prevent terrorism and they asked me all sorts of questions about how violent my parents are and did I believe in violence as a tool to solve problems, etc. Sometimes our tendency is to "civilize" children when we think parents aren't doing that. What OP and you are trying to say is that what parents and family offer (accountability, care for the child, etc.) is usually better than any "values" an institution can impart onto a child. Institutions can often be cold and cruel in a way few parents ever are, and so the tendency to lean on institutions with regards to molding children is one we should avoid unless absolutely necessary.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
The government would have never let the Church (run schools) take responsibility for the kids if the Church wasn't mistreating them like this. They would have just run their own abusive boarding schools. Slow moving genocide and generally treating these populations like crap to the point where they chose to forgo their culture was the whole point.
- DanHulton 5y ago
  I was about to disagree with you, when my brain finally made sense of the double negative in that first paragraph. So I figured I'd just leave a comment to that effect to save anyone else the same potential mistake. In short, above is saying that the abuse and neglect was a feature, not a bug, as far as the government was concerned, and is absolutely correct.
refurb 5y ago
The whole system makes a lot more sense if you imagine it through the belief in the “white man’s burden” at the time - it was the white man’s responsibility to educate and assimilate “inferior” cultures into the “superior” Western system. Not to excuse the damage done, but the people doing these things felt like it was their moral responsibility - if they didn’t do it, these cultures would forever be stuck in their inferior ways. That attitude hasn’t disappeared.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >That attitude hasn’t disappeared. It's undergone a very successful rebranding and PR campaign.
  - andai 5y ago
    To what?
    - dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
      https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
    - refurb 5y ago
      Woke politics.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Yes, and this is the most difficult form of racism to recognize and avoid. Hatred is easy to recognize. Racism without hatred is often discounted. It’s the people with good intentions who are acting with inherent biases and preconceived world-views who often commit acts of blatant racism without anyone realizing until it’s too late.
  - behnamoh 5y ago
    I find it odd that some Christian conservatives in the US support policies which are essentially racist. I had a talk with my girlfriend about it and she mentioned one reason could be that they actually think they're doing the right thing according to the Bible. It's true that religion/belief-system "partitions" people -- you're either one of us or we must be against you. Not saying that some (supposedly) Christians aren't taking advantage of religion to justify their agenda, but many actually believe what they're doing is right. It's also difficult to change this situation because for many people maintaining homeostasis is much easier and more favorable than opening up their minds to other opinions. Many religious people (not just Christians) I've known just want to follow a set of "rules" and have a simple standard life.
secondcoming 5y ago
In at least Ireland, not all of the children were abandoned either. Quite a few were guilty of being born out of wedlock. Luckily Ireland has cast aside the influence of the Catholic church these days.
samstave 5y ago
and then there is the 'conspiracy theory' about the queen of england going to canada to see a bunch of children who later went missing.... Elite pedophiles are a real thing. Abuses such as this are a real thing. Also, anyone who calls them self a 'royal' can just go fuck themselves. They're kleptocracy and thats all there is to them.
beloch 5y ago
Hunter-gatherer societies across the world have, historically, fared poorly when agricultural or pastoral societies have moved into their territory. Complete extermination (i.e. genocide) or complete assimilation is the rule, not the exception. Such genocides happened all over the world but have mostly passed out of living memory with the winners preferring not to be reminded of them. This didn't happen in Canada for several reasons. Most native tribes, especially in the West, were not crushed militarily, as they were in the U.S.. The crown and most tribes signed treaties. While what was going on South of the border was, no doubt, instructive, it's to both sides' credit that they looked for a peaceful way to coexist. The terms of those treaties remain controversial today but, nonetheless, they put Canada's natives on fundamentally different footing than almost any other overrun hunter-gatherer societies in human history. They had an established, legal right to continue existing. It's incredibly difficult for us, today, to understand the state of affairs that existed just after these treaties were signed. Native tribes were not peacefully co-existing, stagnant populations that had existed in the same spot for thousands of years. They moved around, bumped into each other, struggled to defend territories, had wars, raided each other. Raiding was so honoured and economically important in some tribe's cultures that even other native tribes did not want to be their neighbours. A big part of why so many tribes were eager to sign treaties with the Crown was that the Crown was promising security. They wouldn't have to continually fight other tribes to keep their sources of food secure. The Crown proved to be a less than completely secure food source themselves at first, but that's another discussion. When we, today, talk about the desire of leaders such as John A Macdonald to "kill the Indian in the child", we find this atrocious. We respect diversity of religion and culture. However, at the time of John A Macdonald, native culture presented real problems. It was actually progressive for the time to think that natives could be as productive as any other Canadian citizens if they could be educated to adopt European economic pursuits and abandon cultural practices, such as raiding, that were wholly incompatible with the peace and order the Crown promised its citizens, native and European alike. There were those, at the time, who still espoused outright genocide. There remain, even today, places in the world where outright genocide is pursued actively. The residential schools are a painful part of history that is still, very much, in raw living memory. However, we must look at the big picture too. In almost any other place and time in history, native cultures would already be utterly extirpated. They still exist and thrive in Canada and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to do so. How many other times in history have cultures so alien to each other managed to coexist? There remain many problems to tackle, but hope for the future is well justified based on Canada's past.

gchamonlive 5y ago

> when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment I don't follow your logic leap. You exampled a lot of incidents with institutions but that only, in the best case advocates for institutions being nasty, not family, because it doesn't account for abuse within a family context. Is it quantifiably greater in institutions? We can't answer that by the information provided.

tw04 5y ago
The average family doesn't have a child buried in their yard. So yes I think we can say with confidence these institutions were and are quantifiably worse.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical.
  - tw04 5y ago
    > The average institute also doesnt have children buried in the yard. Your conclusion isnt logical. I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The average residential school does. That's why they're looking. The estimate was 6000 dead children across Canada and they expect that's low. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of-history-residential-schools https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of... > As many as 6,000 children died in residential institutions, which ran from 1876 to 1996. >The accurate figure could be much higher however, since the government stopped recording aboriginal students’ deaths in 1920 in light of the alarming statistics.
    - Xylakant 5y ago
      Residential schools are a special case compared to other institutions, though. They were deliberately created to destroy indigenous communities. The cruelty was not an aberration, it was part of the system.

Retric 5y ago

Child abuse and neglect by parents is also something that exists. It’s easy to see problems, but context and improvements are much more difficult. The US removed sanitariums due to serious issues, but the situation didn’t improve instead dumping the mentality ill into the prison and homeless populations. Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems? That’s the kind of analysis that’s difficult yet essential for actual improvement.

batch12 5y ago
> Currently the US use foster homes rather than orphanages, but is it a better system, just different, or worse simply a more efficient way to hide problems I can say anecdotally that being in a foster home was a much better experience than being in group homes. I am sure experiences vary, but I went from feeling like I was a prisioner in group homes to a family in a foster home.
- Retric 5y ago
  To be clear, I truly believe the median foster homes is better than the median group home. Unfortunately the variance is the problem, with some foster homes and some group homes being truly abusive.
tremon 5y ago
Ultimately, group homes are operating a business. The people running such homes are working there, not necessarily living there. That means the adults don't need to form an emotional bond with the children, while the children do need to form emotional bonds with the adults for their development. That mismatch doesn't exist in foster homes, foster parents are much more likely to invest in foster children (both emotionally and financially) than group home caregivers are. To take a very blunt IT analogy, it's a cattle vs pets distinction.
- Retric 5y ago
  That’s one way of separating things, however the literature is surprisingly mixed on the topic. EX: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838017726427 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380177264...

elliekelly 5y ago

It seems like the Catholic Church is often (always?) somehow involved in these systemic child abuse/mass grave stories and it’s mind-boggling to me that we continue to allow an organization with that kind of track record to take responsibility for caring for and placing at-risk children.

garyrichardson 5y ago
While that may be true, it’s only part of the situation here. Residential schools in Canada were part of a system by the gov of Canada to eliminate/assimilate the First Nations people. Many argue this was genocide.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  The slash between "eliminate" and "assimilate" is doing a lot of work. It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". You're right regarding the history, of course. Also sadly, one has a way of turning into the other. Well, both are sad anyway.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It highlights two very different meanings of "genocide". It's the distinction between "killing people" and "killing a people". “Killing a people” is genocide. “Killing people” is murder, mass murder if it is lots of people. The latter is sometimes part of the mechanism by which the former is achieved, but there aren’t “two different meanings of ‘genocide’” involved.
    - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
      > “Killing a people” is genocide. But people do change their identities all the time. And sometimes the destruction of one identity leads to the creation of a new one. This has been a key part of all nation-building exercises. It is a purpose of education and mass-media. Is the unification of tribes, the destruction of difference, necessarily "genocide"? Also, if you can speak of the "death of a people", surely you can also speak of a "birth"? What is the source material of the new group? A grouping is an abstract concept. Individual people have a right to exist, but do abstract groups, just because we anthropomorphize them? Any adjective is an abstract grouping of all nouns to which it'd apply.

foolmeonce 5y ago

> Bluntly put, when an institution is given power over children, more than that of a family, and the auditing is lax, you're gonna get maltreatment, and from there unmarked graves. Families are not particularly safe. Systems that pulled children from their family for placement in a "correct" family created similar horror stories and the natural families of many are also horror stories. Air crashes are more notable than auto-crashes despite being less likely per passenger. Similarly, even if institutions fail at 1/10th the rate of placement in families, notable news will still paint us the opposite picture.

AbrahamParangi 5y ago
Is this actually true that families are less or equivalently as safe as institutional living though? At least one study found that rates of abuse in foster homes are ~4x higher than in other homes.
wyager 5y ago
Biological family are the only people in the world who manifestly have real “skin in the game” with respect to ensuring the proper treatment of their children. For almost everyone else, especially in institutional settings, there are always other considerations that come before the welfare of individual children.
at_a_remove 5y ago
I am not disagreeing with you on families. My point is about oversight, and graves. Here, recently, we had a case of some missing kids where the children were killed and buried in the back yard. The difference is that there was a swiftness in catching them. Or that little girl that was starved to death by her parents near to me -- again, caught. When it is an institution, there are no external checks on that institution, and so you get these mass graves and by the time people clue in, the perpetrators are dead. My point is that if you're the one auditing your own books, you can get away with a lot, for a long long time, and sometimes that means retiring with having gotten away with it.

wsc981 5y ago

When I moved to Thailand, I got into contact with a Dutch national of Jewish decent. We occasionally meet over coffee and have a little chat. When he was young, after WW2, he lived in several foster homes spread over Europe and managed by nuns. He told me he often had to sexually pleasure the nuns in order to get some extra food. His parents were not able to care for him in this period, but eventually he got back with his parents. He told me he doesn't look back in anger over that time period though. As far as he knew it was the same in most other foster homes.

kellyarne 5y ago

It's similar to the "contract children" or "indentured child laborers" scandal in Switzerland[1], for children born out of wedlock, which continued until 1960. It's amazing how the same story keeps repeating in many countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdingkinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdingkinder

j45 5y ago

It’s dangerous to comment on this article without knowing what residential schools were. Children were forcibly taken from their families by the Canadian government for no other reason than the families they were born into.. to be converted to a different culture and faith and endured horrific abuses across the board in every residential school. A good place to learn why these children specifically suffered, and how monstrously wrong it was (some schools operated into the 1980s and 1990s) is the Truth and reconciliation commission that took place in Canada. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060... http://www.trc.ca/ http://www.trc.ca/

xphilter 5y ago

Leave it to HN to once again take an explicitly racist program (kidnap indigenous kids so as to “civilize” them) and make it seem race neutral.

AbrahamParangi 5y ago

> it has less to do with indigenous children This is a very strong claim to make about cultural genocide: that the children’s race was incidental to the destruction.

twodave 5y ago

And yet one of the less-emphasized progressive tenets is the destruction of the family, because (e.g. in Marxism) the “family” is part of the bourgeoisie and must be abolished along with them.

SZJX 5y ago

This said, some children are genuinely better off in the hands of some state-sponsored foster care (especially more modern ones) than in the hands of some neglectful/abusive parents. I have always been of the opinion that being a parent is a job that requires certain skills just like any other, and not everybody is well-qualified to do the job well, while the traditional society puts pressure on everybody to take the job regardless, which could be very dangerous. The problem with the abuses that we're discussing, as described by somebody down the chain, could be that the church and the foster care institutes are set up in a way so that they are already designated as "special" from the get go. I still don't know if that what's described in Brave New World, i.e. every child in the whole society being raised collectively, is such a bad idea. The author's apparent derision and demonization of such an idea was the most jarring part when I read the book. In fact, many studies have proposed that the whole idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" is a quite recent invention, or at least is something that was not shared by all hunter-gatherer societies, many of which did raise their children as a group. In fact one could well argue that the strict adherence to monogamy and to one nuclear family is contrary to the human nature, which the incredibly high rate of divorce in the modern society seems to support to a certain degree. Ironically, the very idea of "marriage" and "nuclear family" seems to be something heavily promoted, even enshrined, by the Christian religions, which themselves committed such atrocious crimes on children. I guess my main point is, your position seems to be one that emphasizes the importance of "family", while I've always been wary of the idea of elevation of "marriage" and "family" as something of a doctrine, even sacred and not subject to any debate. This idea has always sounded very traditional and potentially irrational to me.

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