‘Room went black, she was gone’: Canadian forced adoption mum tells RT how her baby was taken
One
of the hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers forced by the Canadian
government to surrender their babies after WWII has told RT she thought
she would never see her daughter again.
Over 300,000 mothers are
believed to have been impacted by Canada’s draconian adoption laws
between the 1940s and 1970s. They saw unwed women being forced to give
their babies up for adoption to traditional families. Some were told to
“get a puppy to cuddle” instead.
Hanne Andersen told RT she was
impregnated at the age of 15 after being allegedly raped. Yet
authorities failed to assess her case thoroughly.
“There was no
conversation with me about how I got pregnant, all they cared about was
the fact that I got pregnant and that I had a baby that they could
take,” Andersen told RT.
She said her parents were induced to
sign over her daughter’s custody as they were immigrants from Europe who
“believed they would get deported if they didn’t follow what the
government wanted.”
Unmarried women were housed in
government-funded “maternity homes” managed by mainstream religious
orders in the three decades following the Second World War. Most of them
left the houses without their babies as the adoption rate was 96
percent at the time, compared to a mere two percent today.
Andersen said she had to ask three times before they allowed her to see her baby girl once she was born.
“I had to yell ‘bring me my baby now’.
Powerful As God - The Children's Aid Societies of
Ontario
“And then the nurse stopped, looked at the doctor for permission and I was quite surprised the nurse had to ask for permission for me to hold my own daughter since I’m her legal guardian, ” Andersen recalls.
She claims she was drugged up and given lactation suppressants when they took her daughter from her.
“I had my daughter in my arms and then the room went black and I started to pass out and then they took her away from me,” she said.
Monica Byrne, mother and director of Parent Finders described the sort of rhetoric forced adoption victims were fed.
“’You will forget the child. Go home, get married and have other children, or, if not get a puppy to cuddle.’
“That is what I was told. ‘Get a puppy.’”
Andersen did not see her child again for 23 years. It was thanks to her daughter reaching out to her that the two met again. But Andersen said it took them six months to build a relationship.
“She needed to feel safe because our children were told there was something wrong with us. They were told an alternate story that we were drug addicts, prostitutes,” she explained.
A report in July authored by the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs calls for the government to issue apologies and reparations over a policy that “may have been a product of the times, but was cruel, nonetheless, from any perspective.”
RT.com In The Now - Duplessis Orphanage, Canada's
Genecide
Toronto police profiling, searching Black man who
called to report a crime
Activists say community-led initiatives and socioeconomic opportunities, not more police, key to ending gun violence.by Jillian Kestler-D'Amours Montreal, Canada - Louis March has seen this before.
So, too, have many community activists in Toronto, who have urged officials to take concrete steps to address the root causes of gun violence in Canada's largest city for years.
"The gun violence that we're seeing right now is a product, a consequence, of what we didn't do right yesterday," March told Al Jazeera as he reflected on the city's response to rising levels of gun violence in Toronto, including Sunday's shooting that left an 18-year-old woman and a 10-year-old girl dead.
While city councillors debate how to respond to that shooting and other incidents of deadly gun violence across the city, March, who is the founder of Zero Gun Violence, a movement working with dozens of local groups to reduce gun violence in Toronto, said the situation is a result of years of bad policies.
From putting more police on the streets, to deploying new technology and pledging money for social programmes, the city has said it is doing everything it can.
On Tuesday, the city council passed a series of measures meant to curb gun violence, including a request for the federal and provincial governments to ban handgun and ammunition sales in Toronto.
But for March, like many community activists, the solution lies in community-led initiatives and socioeconomic opportunities, as well as in ending policies that have led to discrimination.
"You do not ignore, you do not oppress, you do not deny and exclude people, and then expect them to be walking around with a smile on their face," he said.
Spike in gun-related violence
According to Toronto police data, the city has experienced 228 shootings so far this year, and 308 people have been the victims of gun violence in the city, including 29 people who were killed.
That includes a shooting on Danforth Avenue in Toronto's east end Sunday that left two dead and 13 others injured.
This year's tally is higher than what was recorded at the same time last year, when Toronto had 205 shootings and 299 victims of gun-related violence, the police data shows.
Earlier this year, the federal government said gang-related homicides have nearly doubled since 2013 in Canada's largest cities. In March, it hosted a summit on gun and gang violence, bringing in various stakeholders to try to find solutions.
March, meanwhile, said gun violence has changed in Toronto in recent years.
Guns are more widely available than ever before - "there are more guns out there than there are jobs," he said - and the calibre of the weapons has increased, from smaller handguns to semi-automatics.
"The people using the guns are young kids, teenagers. The brazenness of the shootings, in public spaces, that has changed - in a playground, in a public shopping mall; we didn't used to see that," he said.
The increase in shootings prompted Toronto Mayor John Tory to announce a multi-million-dollar plan to boost community services in areas with high levels of gun crimes, such as employment fairs, mental health support, and programs for youth.
Among the anti-gun-violence motions the city passed on Tuesday, CBC News reported that the city will increase funding to a programme for at-risk youth, ask the provincial coroner to conduct inquests into each gun-related death, put in place a gun amnesty buy-back programme and hire 100 new police officers.
Indeed, much of the city's focus has been on police enforcement.
In a statement at the start of July, Tory said the city planned to hire 200 police officers this year, and modernise the police service "to ensure there are more officers patrolling the streets".
He also said he would push for tougher bail conditions, and stricter gun control measures.
"The answers are easy if we work together to deploy more police and support the police to actually get these thugs behind bars and keep them there," Tory said.
While
March said it's positive the city is acting, he said it's only doing it
because gun violence has reached areas that aren't often affected, such
as Queen Street and Danforth Avenue, two busy, east-west arteries
filled with shops and restaurants.
"If
[gun violence] was in certain neighbourhoods where there's poverty,
unemployment, lack of education, lack of supports, it didn't seem to
concern them. But now that it's in the public spaces … they're
concerned," March said.
"And that is scary because they're deciding which lives are important and which are not."
Don
Peat, a spokesperson for the mayor, told Al Jazeera "gun violence in
any part of our city is horrible and completely unacceptable".
Tory
has been working with city staff, as well as police, community housing
officials and community groups to do "everything possible to prevent gun
violence and to address the root causes of violence", Peat said in an
email.
Racist policies
While
March said it's positive the city is acting, he said it's only doing it
because gun violence has reached areas that aren't often affected, such
as Queen Street and Danforth Avenue, two busy, east-west arteries
filled with shops and restaurants.
However,
Black community activists have condemned the mayor for using words like
"thugs" to describe the perpetrators of gun violence in Toronto.
Tory
also called the people responsible for a recent shooting at a
playground that injured two young girls "anti-social sewer rats".
Idil
Abdillahi, an assistant professor at Ryerson University's School of
Social Work, said that dehumanising language has very real effects on
all Black residents of Toronto.
"How do you reconcile identifying us as non-human, while also then saying that we're going to put money into social programmes?" she told Al Jazeera.
The
mayor's comments also came as Ontario's Minister of Community Safety
and Correctional Services, Michael Tibollo, and city councillor Giorgio
Mammoliti said they had to wear bulletproof vests to visit a
predominantly Black neighbourhood of Toronto called Jane and Finch.
Many
condemned the move as racist, accusing the politicians of fuelling the
misconception that the neighbourhood is rife with danger.
"Every
time we deem Black people as dangerous, we need to understand there are
real life outcomes and consequences, and those … are death: death as in
actual death, and death as in social and political death and isolation,"
Abdillahi said.
She was among a group of Black activists,
scholars and community members who signed an open letter, published on
Tuesday, that urged the city to treat gun violence as a public health
issue.
"Research and common sense show that an increased
militarisation of police does not curb gun violence and certainly is not
focused on prevention," the letter reads. "We demand that the millions approved for militaristic interventions in these neighbourhoods go to community initiatives to provide affordable housing, jobs, and social and health services."
The signatories also criticised the city for backing a new type of surveillance technology, known as ShotSpotter, as part of its response to the violence. On Tuesday, the city approved a funding request to implement the system.
The technology - a network of microphones that can be affixed to buildings, lampposts and other structures - is meant to help rapidly recognise and locate gunshots, and then transmit that information to first responders, including police.
But whether it actually works to reduce gun crimes is unclear.
According to a 2016 investigation by Reveal, a project from the US-based Center for Investigative Reporting, of the more than 3,000 ShotSpotter alerts sent out over a two-and-a-half-year period in San Francisco, only two arrests were made, and only one of those was related to a gun.
The technology, Reveal found, "generally plays a minor role for prosecutors and police trying to reduce gun crime."
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association also raised concern about the SharpShooter technology, which it said "could run afoul of constitutional privacy rights". "Worse, if placed in racialised neighbourhoods, the new technology may be an unconstitutional sucker punch to already marginalised population," the group said in a statement.
Repeating past mistakes?
But Abdillahi said the surveillance of Black communities in Toronto is not new.
"This is a continuation," she said. "There's a particularity in this strategy, but that doesn't mean there wasn't surveillance before … We've been under the thumb of this 'modern policing' for some time."
This also isn't the first time Toronto has been host to a debate over how to address gun violence.
After a spike in gun-related murders in 2005, a period known as the Summer of the Gun, Toronto put in place a contentious police programme called TAVIS, aiming to counter gun violence by deploying more officers into areas with high levels of it.
Critics said the controversial programme led to racial profiling - a Toronto police practice known as carding allowed officers to stop and check peoples' IDs without needing to have a reason - and the criminalisation of Black communities.
In 2012, shootings at the Eaton Centre, a multi-floor, downtown shopping mall, and at a block party in Scarborough, an eastern suburb of Toronto, also led to a flurry of promises to crack down on gang violence.
Toronto's then-mayor, the late Rob Ford, vowed to boost police funding and launch a "war on gangs". He also rejected calls to bolster community programmes, calling them "hug a thug" initiatives that don't produce results.
While TAVIS was cancelled in 2016 after the provincial government slashed its funding amid widespread criticism, Ontario Premier Doug Ford (Rob's brother) has hinted at bringing it back.
After Sunday's shooting, Ford, whose Progressive Conservative Party was elected last month, said he plans to redirect some of the $1.4b ($1.9b Canadian) previously pledged for mental health and addiction support programmes, to the police.
Listening to the communities critical
Beverly Bain, a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus, told Al Jazeera she has seen over-policing in largely Black communities in Toronto over the past 40 years.
She said Black communities are not the sources of violence in the city, but they are recipients of it, often through heavy-handed police tactics and other policies.
"What goes on in the Black community is a response to the violence that it experiences, and the responses to the kinds of policing and the kinds of state economic and political strategies that bear down on this community, forcing them to live in untenable conditions," she said.
Bain said city and provincial authorities must work with activists in Black communities to implement solutions local people are putting forward themselves.
"It has to be approaches that are less about policing, and more about creating socioeconomic policies," Bain said.
"It cannot be putting more police officers into these communities. It cannot be about arming our police officers. It cannot be about more surveillance technologies, and it cannot be about TAVIS."
This is not a surprise. What is a surprise to us is the lack of political leadership and resolve to deal with it, not only when it spills over into other communities, but in the communities where we know that it's normalised.
Louis March, founder of Zero Gun Violence
March agreed, saying the city should focus on prevention, rather than enforcement.
He said local programmes that are working to address gun violence in communities most affected by the problem need to be amplified, and they need funding.
The underlying causes that contribute to the violence - poverty, oppression, social exclusion and neglect - also need to be at the forefront of any strategy, he said.
"We work on the streets. We work with these kids; they want a way out, but in many cases, there's no way out for them - because the government is not addressing this problem in a meaningful way," said March.
"So this is not a surprise. What is a surprise to us is the lack of political leadership and resolve to deal with it, not only when it spills over into other communities, but in the communities where we know that it's normalised."
Thousands of Canadian mothers were forced to give up their babies. Some were told to ‘get a puppy’ instead. . By Amanda Coletta: TORONTO – Their stories would not seem out of place in an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” – pregnant women shuttered away, violently restrained during childbirth, banned from looking at their babies – and, finally, coerced by social workers into signing adoption papers.
More than a half-century after unmarried and largely non-consenting Canadian women were sent to maternity homes to give birth in relative secrecy, a report released Thursday by a Senate committee acknowledges a “disturbing chapter” in Canadian history, when the country’s adoption policies led to hundreds of thousands of unwed mothers being forced to give up their babies for adoption.
The report calls on the federal government to issue a formal apology for what it characterizes as a “common practice” from 1945 to the 1970s that has been “shrouded in secrecy.”
“There is another Scoop that needs to be acknowledged,” Art Eggleton, the senator who chaired the committee, told reporters. (He was referring to the “Sixties Scoop,” a 1960s government program that separated thousands of indigenous children from their families and put them up for adoption by non-indigenous parents.)
While adoption policies fell under the jurisdiction of Canada’s provinces and territories, the federal government provided them with social assistance grants, which were often used to address the needs of pregnant women. Those funds “specifically contributed to the maintenance of maternity homes for unmarried mothers, the provision of adoption and counseling services and supporting the casework of social workers.”
The report says that the “unethical” policy was in part rooted in the societal mores of the postwar period, when the social stigma of unwed women having “illegitimate” children and raising them in a nontraditional “nuclear family” was so significant that many women were sent to wait out their pregnancies at maternity homes, often run by religious groups or the Salvation Army. An estimated 95 percent of women who gave birth at maternity homes gave their children up for adoption, according to the report. Data from Statistics Canada shows that approximately 600,000 births from 1945 to 1971 were recorded as “illegitimate.”
According to Origins Canada, a nonprofit that helps people who have been separated from family members by adoption, it was thought that women who gave birth at maternity homes could be “made marriageable” again or “rehabilitated.”
Many of the women who testified before the committee described being subjected to various forms of abuse at maternity homes, having their movements controlled, being forced to assume fictitious surnames and having no contact with the outside world.
Eugenia Powell, who in 1963 was sent to a maternity home at the advice of a priest when she became pregnant at 17, testified that she felt “like a nonentity.”
“Shame and sadness were constant companions,” said Powell, who is the executive director of Origins Canada.
During labor, the report says, doctors would often forcibly strap women to beds or overmedicate them. Many were denied the opportunity to hold, feed or look at their babies, and some were never told whether they had given birth to a boy or a girl.
And then, they were forced – often through misinformation, deceit and violence – into giving up their babies for adoption. None were provided legal counsel or made aware of their legal rights. Others were told that “traditional, white, middle-class couples would provide loving homes without the shame.” And some were lied to, callously told that their babies were stillborn, when in fact they were not.
“I was told that I would eventually get married and forget my baby,” Powell testified. “How does a mother forget her baby?”
Sandra Jarvie, another woman who testified, said she still remembers what a social worker told her after she signed adoption papers: “You will never see your baby again as long as you live. If you search for the baby, you’ll destroy his life and the lives of the adoptive parents.”
Some women, the report notes, were told to “get a puppy” to fill the void of losing child and never to speak of what happened to them. Nearly one-third of the unwed women who were coerced into giving up their babies for adoption were so traumatized that they never had children again, according to the report.
“The treatment of unmarried mothers in postwar Canada may have been a product of the times, but it was cruel, nonetheless, from any perspective,” the report concludes.
“The profound pain and grief of losing my firstborn baby never left and often surfaced,” said Powell, who did get married and have other children. “I have simply never recovered from the trauma of losing my baby. … I had lived in what I call a fog because that was the only way I could cope through my life.”
