Do you want figures on child abuse in Quebec? Last year was a record year: 132,632 reports were processed by the youth protection departments.
What is happening in Quebec society to make children so unloved? The little martyr of Granby is dead, but, every day, new children suffer abuse from parents who are now forbidden to judge except to recognize their victim status.
Today’s Quebec never ends through depressing statistics of breaking records that send us back as a community in social regression.
What are our benchmarks? What are the real values that inhabit us?
In fact, we are witnessing an increase in family violence in Canada. However, between 2009 and 2021, according to Statistics Canada, it is in Quebec that we note the most dramatic increase (+23%) and in New Brunswick (+22%). While in British Columbia, there is a rate of -28% and in Prince Edward Island -16%.
Shortage
The Department of Youth Protection has been implicated for years. This organization, once cited as an example in several Western countries, is now only a shadow of itself. Perhaps for lack of social workers, retired or subjected to such psychological pressures in front of the abuse of children that they abandon one after the other.
There is something terrifying in noting the profound discrepancy between the official discourse on our collective virtues in the protection of children and the brutal reality that strikes us on a daily basis when the media publish news items whose horror does not seem have no limits.
We are far from the myth so long maintained of a Quebec as a land of love for the children of the dozen families of yesteryear.
Our birth rate in Quebec is now one of the lowest in Western countries. As for divorce and the separation of couples, we cannot ignore this disturbing phenomenon on children from which they are the first to suffer. It’s a delicate subject like single parenthood. It is noted that 20% of children live alone with their mother. Nor can it be denied that this situation has various consequences for children.
Readers will certainly reproach me for not highlighting Quebec’s success, but it seems imperative to me to stop embellishing the flaws in our system in which too many Quebecers are prisoners.
Compassion
The best way to judge a society fairly is by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, ie children and the elderly.
Do we need to remember the tragedy of the CHSLDs and the interminable martyrdom of the little girl from Granby so that we do a collective examination of conscience on our ability to treat our children and our elderly with dignity?
Commissions of inquiry will lead nowhere if Quebec society persists in believing that all our tragedies and excesses are the fault of the government and the institutions that supervise us.
Our indifference is distorting us. It proves that our selfishness is the primary source of our terrible cruelty towards the most fragile among us.