The Invisible Struggle: Parents with FASD, the Courts and the Child Intervention System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) encompasses a range of complex neurodevelopmental challenges that arise because of maternal alcohol use during pregnancy. Contrary to previous beliefs, FASD is a wide-ranging condition that is mostly invisible, affecting cognitive, social, and daily living skills. Furthermore, living with FASD may present other challenges, such as mental health issues, substance abuse, and engagement in criminal behavior. FASD is a long-term disability that requires support across the lifespan. The main objective of this research was to determine what, if anything, has changed since a prior review in 2020 of parents with FASD appearing in child intervention courts in Canada. We found eleven relevant reported cases throughout Canada from 2020 to 2024 where parents had a confirmed diagnosis or a potential FASD to be eligible for our study. Within these cases, only one parent was able to reunite with their children because of the strong and supportive system they had. There were four cases where ongoing contact between parent and child(ren) was permitted, Additionally, we found that professionals lack education regarding the potential skills that people with FASD may demonstrate. A person with FASD is seen through the lens of their diagnosis rather than a strengths-based approach, creating stigma, fear, and power imbalance. Stigma has an impact not just on how professionals see people and make decisions but also on policymakers, funding, and support from governments or other social groups. Individuals or parents with FASD are often reluctant to report their diagnosis for fear of being judged or having their children taken from their care. Thus, parents are unable to obtain access to services, and even when they do have access, they must navigate the system on their own. Parents with FASD who are involved in child intervention may be required to participate in many programs simultaneously, potentially resulting in an overwhelming experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".