After identifying 56 cases where families were “broken apart,” Motherisk Commission calls for sweeping changes in a report with 32 recommendations to “help ensure that no family suffers a similar injustice in the future.”
Ontario’s Motherisk Commission is calling for significant changes to the province’s child protection system after identifying 56 cases where families were “broken apart” due to ’s flawed hair-strand drug and alcohol testing.
In her report released today, Commissioner Judith Beaman described the reliance in child protection cases on the flawed testing, which was produced at a once-trusted lab at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, as “manifestly unfair and harmful.”
“The testing was imposed on people who were among the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, with scant regard for due process of their rights to privacy and bodily integrity,” Beaman said in her report released today, entitled Harmful Impacts. “The discovery that unreliable test results were used as expert evidence in child protection proceedings for so many years undermines the public’s confidence in the fairness of our justice system, particularly with respect to how it treats vulnerable people.”
As the Star has reported, Motherisk’s discredited hair testing influenced at least eight criminal cases and thousands of child protection cases across the country, beginning in the 1990s. Sick Kids made millions from the hair tests, which were purchased by more than 100 child welfare providers in five provinces, who relied on the results primarily as proof of parental substance abuse.
Beaman found that Motherisk’s testing disproportionately impacted Indigenous families, who were involved in nearly 15 per cent of the 1,291 cases the commission reviewed, despite making up less than 3 per cent of Ontario’s population.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...ul-to-families-in-child-protection-cases.html
Ontario’s Motherisk Commission is calling for significant changes to the province’s child protection system after identifying 56 cases where families were “broken apart” due to ’s flawed hair-strand drug and alcohol testing.
In her report released today, Commissioner Judith Beaman described the reliance in child protection cases on the flawed testing, which was produced at a once-trusted lab at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, as “manifestly unfair and harmful.”
“The testing was imposed on people who were among the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, with scant regard for due process of their rights to privacy and bodily integrity,” Beaman said in her report released today, entitled Harmful Impacts. “The discovery that unreliable test results were used as expert evidence in child protection proceedings for so many years undermines the public’s confidence in the fairness of our justice system, particularly with respect to how it treats vulnerable people.”
As the Star has reported, Motherisk’s discredited hair testing influenced at least eight criminal cases and thousands of child protection cases across the country, beginning in the 1990s. Sick Kids made millions from the hair tests, which were purchased by more than 100 child welfare providers in five provinces, who relied on the results primarily as proof of parental substance abuse.
Beaman found that Motherisk’s testing disproportionately impacted Indigenous families, who were involved in nearly 15 per cent of the 1,291 cases the commission reviewed, despite making up less than 3 per cent of Ontario’s population.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...ul-to-families-in-child-protection-cases.html
