Human Vulnerabilities and Tragedies

When desperately degraded lives intersect with the state of children's well-being, the resulting situation is all too often one that takes the public attention and brings into the picture the very real and usually deserved prospect of children taken into custody for their safety and future protection. Protection from the outcomes of their parents' neglect, and situations that place them at high risk for accidents, even death, if not privation and insecurity alone.

Three very young children, little girls, aged 9 months, 2 and 3 years have now all been made wards of the Ottawa Children's Aid Society. This is not an instance when the welfare agency has moved in to secure for themselves the authority to break up a family. This is an obviously genuine instance of real need on the part of the children to somehow have an emotionally secure and safe environment.

They obviously have not found it with their mother, a 25-year-old woman desperately in need herself of some life-style assistance. She may care deeply for her children, but it is difficult to see how deeply she cared, under the circumstances in which the sisters were discovered earlier in the week; literally abandoned, left to their own devices for a substantial period of time; frightened and desperate.

Neighbours, hearing loud sounds of wailing from a unit next to them were alerted that something was wrong. Through a locked door, and seeing the two older of the three little girls - wearing undershirts, their limbs smeared with feces - through a narrow window, sought to comfort the children before calling for emergency assistance. 

When police arrived and made their way into the house they found the 9-month-old sleeping at the top of a set of stairs. Neighbours pieced together a scenario where, 24-hours earlier they had heard loud arguments emanating from the house, and became aware that the mother's boyfriend, the father of one of the little girls, leaving.

Shortly afterward the mother was seen to be leaving, as well.  She, evidently, made her way to Gatineau. The neighbours were unaware that the three little girls were on their own, with no one there to look to their welfare. They became fully cognizant of the situation the following day.  Police took the children to the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

They asked the mother, when she became aware of the situation, to come along; she sent a man in her stead to pick the girls up from the hospital. Unable to verify who he was the children were not released to him. The mother now has a lawyer. "She knew when she was at the courthouse that she was going to be arrested. She feels just sort of floored by the whole thing", the lawyer commented.

She is being charged with child abandonment and mischief endangering life. She is additionally charged with a breach of probation. Reporters looking into court records ascertained that the mother had served a brief jail sentence in 2007. She had been placed on a year's probation for theft. This is a human being who desperately needs help.

In her vulnerable and failing condition she is hardly capable of assuming the care of three infants. As unfortunate as it is for the children and for their mother, it appears readily apparent that the children will benefit from a loving home, elsewhere than with their natural mother.  Perhaps they will then have a better chance to find their place in life than their mother has had.