It’s wrong.
The new law adopted last year would have changed absolutely nothing for the simple reason that the worker to whom a teenager confided in 2004 simply did not believe her, she closed the file without further ado. ceremony. It was not until 2021 that another complaint was made, and this time the victim was believed.
The problem is not the law, it is this annoying habit that too many workers have of telling children “I hear you”, without really listening to them.
Mind you, we can’t blame them, the example comes from above, from the big boss, the minister himself. Questioned in chambers on March 27 on a mutiny which had taken place at the Val-du-Lac rehabilitation center in Estrie, he gave this response. “Talking to young people is not necessarily something we have to do. It’s not something I want to do myself. We are talking about young people who are in youth protection. These are not young people we meet in the street.”
And since we can’t see them on the street, it’s okay to make them invisible.
Not to talk to them.
Young people placed in rehabilitation centers are so cut off from the world that they are hardly informed of their rights. During the study of budgetary appropriations, the president of the Commission on Human Rights and Youth Rights (CDPDJ), Philippe-André Tessier, had to recognize that awareness campaigns online and on social networks are not not giving back to them, they don’t have access to their phone.
They only have access to leaflets and then some.
As a result, no more than 2% of the requests for investigations made to the CDPDJ are made by young people themselves.
And yet, rehabilitation centers regularly make headlines for the dilapidated facilities, the labor shortage and the glaring lack of services for young people. We note a significant use of restraint and isolation rooms, measures whose effectiveness – and relevance – are far from unanimous.
We also observe an increasingly frequent use of private agencies. “The young person never has the same worker, or very rarely the same worker, in the medium and long term to help him in his rehabilitation, which means that we become more of a “prison” model, of surveillance of a group of young people, only a model where we really come to promote our rehabilitation,” denounced two weeks ago to Le Devoir Robert Comeau, president of the Alliance of professional and technical personnel in health and social services (APTS).
Questioned in the chamber last week by the solidarity deputy Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, Lionel Carmant made fun of it, in a tone of incredible condescension. “I am really disappointed. I don’t want to answer that right now. Sincerely, sincerely, am I going to answer that? I cannot answer that, Madam Speaker. A prison model? So, I left the health network to implement a prison model. So let’s see! Well, let’s see! It’s terrible!”
The minister laughs, the CAQ elected officials behind him too.
(National Assembly of Quebec)
I imagine being a young person in a center, and hearing that. Whether the minister likes it or not, rehabilitation centers have always had the appearance of prisons, including the security units found there where young people are treated no more and no less like inmates. Strip searches are carried out there, sometimes to find a simple vaping device.
But we don’t listen to them.
We do not listen to them enough in court, where lawyers choose not to have them testify. Not to mention the fact that many children never see their lawyer, including on the North Shore, where young people are hardly ever seen. And then, we will pretend that decisions are made in their interest.
Like this teenager who is refused to return to her mother because she has made five suicide attempts, which is interpreted as blackmail.
The new law has not changed anything.
As long as children and young people are not listened to, as long as they are not believed, as long as we do not take the trouble to verify what they say, to carry out real investigations, the new law will remain what For the moment, it is a collage of wishful thinking. The minister may wrap himself in it and take pleasure in it, but it will take more than that.
He would have to open his eyes first.
And let him act.
And you absolutely need a guard dog, a real one. It is still ironic that the CDPDJ went to the Supreme Court to defend Jérémy Gabriel’s right not to make people laugh about his disability and that, if he had been sexually assaulted in a youth center, it would have accepted flat apologies from the DPJ and a promise that it will not happen again.
The Commission repeats that in youth, it does not want to go to court for specific cases, that its objective is to conduct “systemic” cases, to correct situations. No, its mandate is to ensure that the rights of children and young people are respected and to take action when they are not respected, as it does to ensure that the rights enshrined in the Charter are respected.
There cannot be double standards.
Five years ago, yesterday, we learned of the death of the little girl from Granby in atrocious conditions. We later learned that there had been shortcomings at each stage, each stage, of the progress of his file at the DPJ. There was a special commission on children’s rights, and its president Régine Laurent said at the opening of the hearings that his death “will have been the spark plug for national awareness. A breaking point in the face of our failure.”
There is still so much to do.
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