Reforming Nova Scotia's Secure Care Model: Gender Bias and Calls to Action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following paper is a critical analysis of Nova Scotia’s secure care model which is legislated under ss. 55-56 of the Children and Family Services Act. Under these provisions, children who are in the care of the Minister of Community Services or Mi’kmaw Family & Children’s Services of Nova Scotia may be confined against their will at the Wood Street Centre in Truro, Nova Scotia. This paper makes two critical arguments. The first is that the legislation concerning secure care in this province is notably overbroad, leaving children who are in crisis vulnerable to being subjected to what is akin to a carceral sentence at Wood Street. The second is that girls and adolescent women are particularly vulnerable to being confined in this facility due to lingering paternalistic attitudes toward female behavior, sexual autonomy, and mental health. Upon my review of recorded secure treatment application hearings in Nova Scotia, I found that judicial comments and legal reasoning appeared to demonstrate a bias toward female youth when compared to their male counterparts. This paper ultimately urges law makers to consider the harmful impacts of secure treatment and argues that law reform for secure care in Nova Scotia is necessary to protect and already extremely vulnerable subset of our population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".