Systemic Neglect in the Ontario Child Welfare System: An Analysis of Youth Testimonies from the 2012 Youth Leaving Care Hearings in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines and incorporates the themes from youth narratives in My Real-Life Book: Report from the Youth Leaving Care Hearings in Ontario (2012). Employing and engaging with the voices of those directly impacted by the child welfare system (CWS), namely youth in care (YICs), former youth in care (FYICs), and adoptees, this research offers an important alternate narrative to dominant public discourses that problematize children and youth in care. Using a social justice education lens that engages with an integrated scaffolded framework applying critical race theory (CRT), anti-racist feminist theory, and the concepts of Foucault and Bourdieu, this dissertation examines YIC/FYIC/Adoptees’ narratives to expose how systemic power imbalances impact youth through institutional neglect. The analysis of the youths’ narratives along with the researcher’s themes from the literature review, reveals the impacts of institutional practices devoid of meaningful, purposeful youth participation in decision-making, the lack of stability, and the life-long impacts of mandated care purported to protect children and youth. Critical discourse analysis is applied to analyze youth narratives to expose implicit and explicit realities contextualized within broader historical and socio-political frameworks that shape the experiences of YICs. This research also includes current public perspectives offered by key stakeholders, such as child advocates, social workers, health and mental health advocates, educators, criminal justice researchers and housing advocates. Thus, the study provides an important perspective on and understanding of how interconnected institutions maintain structural disparities in access to opportunities. The findings and analysis accentuate the potential for youth voices to transform the CWS by challenging dominant structural hierarchies and existing practices that are no longer helpful to youth in care. This work advocates for and contributes to the current research, highlighting the critical need for meaningfully collaborative policies and practices toward institutional reform with input from youth who are directly impacted by interconnected systems. Finally, this research aims to intensify the plea for a genuine, empathetic, equitable, and humane CWS that fosters youth agency, autonomy, and dignity. Keywords: Youth in care; child welfare system; critical race theory; systemic power imbalances; critical discourse analysis; Bourdieu; Foucault.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".