Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue 8 - Evidence - Afternoon meeting
EDMONTON, Wednesday, September 20, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 1:58 p.m. to examine and report upon Canada's international obligations in regards to the rights and freedoms of children.
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, ladies and gentlemen, we are here to continue our study of the examination and report upon Canada's international obligations in regards to the rights and freedoms of children.
This afternoon, honourable senators, we have a roundtable of what has been classed here as of children and youth. I feel I could say "of youth" rather than "children," although in the legal sense the definition of "children" under the convention is 18. I presume none of you are over 18, so you qualify for children, but I feel the designation "youth" is rather appropriate.
We are the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights, and we decided that we would study the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Over the last 40 years, the international community has started to develop human rights legislation. We had international agreements on all kinds of issues, but the human rights field is a rather new field.
The first generation of treaties and agreements that were signed were general agreements and, therefore, hard to monitor in a country to see how successful they were.
As they developed, and more particularly in the 1980s, culminating with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it became a more specific agreement, where there were articles that one could start to see how they might be translated in one's own country.
We wanted to look at the Convention on the Rights of the Child and see to what extent has Canada implemented this treaty that it signed and said it would be bound by.
In addition, we wanted to know how many youth, children, in Canada know about their rights under the convention, because we found that was a problem. It was signed in Geneva; the government made quite a splash about signing it. We knew it for a while. However, we want to know to what extent the convention has been taken into policy and practices. Young people cannot exercise their rights if they do not know they have them.
Therefore, we have asked a lot of young people; some who know about their rights, some who do not know about their rights. Obviously, we also want to engage the broader Canadian community in youth and children's issues, so that we do not talk in a vacuum about rights. We want to talk about day-to-day experiences.
In the Convention on the Rights of the Child, basically it says we must give voice to young people, to children. We cannot just program for them, talk to them, talk about them, do what we believe is best for them. If we are really going to succeed, you have to be at the table, you have to have environments where you can express your opinions. You are in charge of your own development, and these are your rights.
Part of this roundtable is to talk to you about the convention, talk to you about the issues that concern you and anything else you may wish.
We are made up of a committee of senators from across Canada. We can go around the table and introduce ourselves and where we are from, and then maybe you can introduce yourselves. Will someone explain at the end how you got here: Are you part of one group, or are you part of some constituencies? Then we can just open it up to the issues that you would like to talk about and let us hear about them.
I am going to start. I am Raynell Andreychuk. I am from Saskatchewan. I have been in the senate now for 13 years, and I have been with the human rights process for quite sometime.
Senator Munson: My name is Jim Munson. I am one of the younger senators at 60. I represent Ontario, but am originally from Atlantic Canada.
Senator Carstairs: I am Sharon Carstairs. I am a senator from Manitoba. I spent 12 years living in Alberta. I was actually born and raised in Nova Scotia. I was a teacher for 21 years, some of which was in Calgary, Alberta. I have been a politician for 22 years and in the senate for 12.
The Chairman: And vice-chair of this committee.
Ms. Barnett: I am Laura Barnett. I am the researcher for the committee. I am from Toronto.
Ms. Moss-Norbury: I am Vanessa Moss-Norbury. I am the clerk of this committee, and I am from Ottawa.
Senator Poy: I am Vivienne Poy. I am a senator from Ontario. My home is Toronto. I was born in Hong Kong; I am of Chinese heritage.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: I am Senator Lovelace Nicholas, and I am a senator from New Brunswick. I am from a First Nations community.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I am Nancy Ruth. I am from Toronto. I used to do clowning. I used to be a church minister. I tried to get elected; I failed, and all of a sudden I made the Senate.
Participant A: I am from Westlock, Alberta. I like animals and reading.
Participant B: I am from Westlock. I like sports.
Participant C: I am here today to discuss youth-based education, and I am from Edmonton, Alberta.
Participant D: I was born in Trinidad. I moved to Saskatoon when I was eight. I just spent my last two years in Calgary going to school, and I just transferred to Edmonton this September to finish my degree in child and youth care counselling.
I was helping Participant E get the youth together through an organization that I was involved with in Saskatoon, so I am excited. I am interested in everything that has to do with youth and children.
Participant E: I am also from Saskatoon. I also just moved here a couple weeks ago. We are co-workers, but we are also very good friends. We got to be friends through this youth-engagement work.
We do not officially work for the Students Commission or The Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement anymore since we moved to Edmonton, but when they found out we had moved out here, we got asked to help get some young people together for this roundtable.
The Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement had helped organize some in Ontario last year sometime, so that is how we got involved. These three were invited by Robert White, who is a social worker in Westlock. This was all pretty last-minute. We all just met for the first time today.
Speaking of young people who are not familiar with human rights or with the convention, these are some, so you are getting a taste of that.
We actually are over 18. We are in our early 20s. We got involved with the Students' Commission when we were about their age. We are more familiar with child rights and the whole area of youth engagement, but we are at the point where we are trying to involve younger people and get their points of view. We will let them do most of the talking, and maybe later we can join in on the discussion if anyone has questions.
The Chairman: Participant C, tell us what concerns you, and then we will go from there.
Participant C: Youth-based education concerns me. If youth got to decide what classes they would take, youth would like education a lot better. Instead of parents deciding, if the youth actually got to decide, they would like classes a lot better.
Teachers and the school board should make education more youth-based so youth would like it better, and I am going to go into that right now.
For music/learning, youth should get to listen to educational music based on their age and music they like. For educational games, games should be educational-based but should also have to be based on youth age. There should be more youth-based textbooks in classes, so textbooks in classes are not so plain. Youth should help put textbooks together, so youth enjoy learning more.
To wrap it all up, youth would enjoy education and want to go to school if youth helped in the educational process and got to decide on what classes they would take, instead of it being more parental-based.
The Chairman: Can you give us an example? You say youth-based music. What is it you get that you do not like? Can you give us an example? What would you like to have?
Participant C: Any kind of music the kids like, let us say rock or rap or country or whatever, more based educationally but yet the kind of music they like.
The Chairman: What are you getting now? Do you get music now?
Participant C: Not really, no.
The Chairman: It is not even there.
Participant C: Yes.
The Chairman: We will open it up to questions, and maybe the senators will have some questions to ask the students.
Senator Munson: Participant C, I am curious about the educational component you just talked about. Being that I was forced to take trigonometry, algebra, physics, and all those subjects, which I hated — and I really did. There was no consultation. Those were the 1960s, and I was not part of any process. It was, "These are the subjects you are going to take, and this is it."
Are you telling us now that there is no process where you can sit back with the student council and/or teachers and have choices?
Participant C: Not really, no. If the students helped in the educational process, like putting together these classes and putting them together so that youth would enjoy them more, more youth-based. If youth got to help with the learning, putting textbooks together, or help with notes or whatever, just to make it not so "plain-Jane," because kids are literally falling asleep in class.
Senator Munson: Can you give us examples of some subjects that you do not like, that you are being forced to take and that there should be an option with another subject?
When people get to university, as you know, that is the first time in their lives that they have a chance to pick and choose. It always seems to be about getting to that arbitrary age of 18, as though that means: Now you are an adult; therefore, you have choices. However, at the age of 15, 16, or 17, youth do not have those choices.
Participant C: Yes. An example would be math. It is bad. Not that I would say take another course, but I mean help the kids, like youth helping kids.
The Chairman: You are not talking about not taking the subject; you are just saying to approach it differently?
Participant C: No, I am not saying not taking them; I am saying take them, but approach it more youth-based. Excite the youth; get help putting together textbooks or whatever. I am not saying do not take the course; I am saying take the course, but make it not so plain.
Senator Carstairs: Participant B, you indicated that your love really was sports. Do you get the kind of opportunity and the kind of help you need to participate in the sports you would like to participate in?
Participant B: We have tryouts. We have intramurals too, so we get to play it two times a week or every day, but the teams can pick. We have this thing that if we do not make the team, we can make this other thing that we go and play for fun.
Senator Carstairs: If you had your choice, would you spend more time engaged in sports than you are right now?
Participant B: Probably not. I do not know.
Senator Carstairs: Participant B, you indicated that you had a great love of animals. Do you find that the education system relates at all to what your interest is in terms of your love of animals, for example?
Participant A: Not really. We learn about animals, but we do not really do anything. We do not get to see animals and really do a lot with them during school. We do not have a lot of animal clubs or anything.
Senator Carstairs: Do you live in a rural community or in an urban community?
Participant A: A rural.
Senator Carstairs: Are you involved in 4-H or that kind of programming?
Participant A: No. We live in town, but it is a really small town.
The Chairman: I am one of the few people maybe, and that is a presumption on my part, that has been to Westlock. It is a surprising community. It is diverse.
Can you tell me who makes up the town, how large it is, how many ethnic groups there are, recent immigrants?
There is a lovely book out on the community. It is a novel written by a student, who is now about 27 years old, and that is where I learned about Westlock. I do not know if you know it.
Who would like to tell us a little about Westlock and how large it is?
Participant B: It has 5,000 people.
The Chairman: How far is it from Edmonton?
Participant B: About 45 minutes to an hour. It depends how fast you drive.
The Chairman: Are most of the people who work there agricultural-based? Do they move in from the farms, or do they come in from Edmonton to live there?
Participant B: I came from Edmonton to live there, but some people in my class would have come from farms, and then they moved to Clyde and to Westlock.
The Chairman: Are kids bused in to Westlock?
Participant B: Yes. There is a bus from Pickardville and Clyde, and town buses and country buses.
The Chairman: In the school system, there used to be a large Catholic seminary, a Catholic high school. Is it still there?
Participant B: There is a Catholic school from kindergarten to Grade 12, and there is the elementary school and then high school.
The Chairman: So how many students are in the high school approximately?
Participant B: There are 200 in junior high and about 300 in high school.
The Chairman: The two of you are in Edmonton, right?
Participant D: Participant C is in Edmonton. The three of us are here.
The Chairman: Participant C, where are you in Edmonton, what area?
Participant C: I live on the south side, and I go to McNally High School. McNally has probably got about 500 students. It is not a very big high school.
The Chairman: Are there Aboriginal kids there?
Participant C: Yes. There is a big ethnic group. There is pretty much every ethnic group you can think of in that school.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Participant A, part of my curiosity is around if you are interested in animals, and you wanted to bring something into the class or to structure a club or do something within the system in your school, how would it be possible?
I will ask you the same kind of question, Participant C. You seem to be talking more about the way classes are taught rather than, "You have to do history or math" or whatever it is. Is there any way to make complaints or to help teachers grow or make suggestions, or is it that they are there and you are here, and there seems no way to make these changes happen if that is what you want?
Participant C: If you wanted to, yes, you could approach the school board with it. That would be a big process, but I do not know. It would probably be worth it.
Participant A: In our school, we probably could if we really wanted to, but we have to have lots of people interested in it, and usually, because there are not very many people in our school, there are not enough people to get into clubs to start one.
Senator Nancy Ruth: The other generic question I wanted to ask was if you could all say something about drugs, sex, religion and racism.
Participant C: About the drugs and alcohol part, that is bad in a lot of schools now. There are a lot of drugs floating around. The biggest drug, I feel, that is floating around right now is crystal meth because it is cheap for the kids. It is terribly addictive drug. I have had a few friends who have tried it and got really addicted, and they are in rehab right now.
Alcohol is bad, and there is just a lot of partying going on; now that school is back in, not as much, but over the summer there are parties everywhere.
About sex, yes, a lot of teenage sex, lots of that.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Is it consensual or rape or a bit of both?
Participant C: More than enough times it is consensual, but there is the odd rape case.
There is a lot of racism. There are lots of kids running around painting the Nazi signs everywhere, and it is really bad. I have a few friends that are from Africa; they are Sudanese. They get harassed quite a bit. Kids are pretty racist toward them. The Pakistani and Afghani groups, they get called terrorists, and it is bad. It is not cool.
Senator Nancy Ruth: If this is happening, what kind of ideas would you have to try to heal some of these problems, whether it is drugs, alcohol, booze, rape, racism? It is tough, and if anybody had an answer, we would all be out doing it, but I am just wondering if you have got something.
Participant C: I feel you can educate the kids as much as you want, but it is how they grow up. It comes from the home: the way the parents act, the way the parents treat the kids, the way the parents live, and the friends they have. It is what kids choose.
The Chairman: You are saying it is the parents. We keep hearing that it is what they get on the Internet, what they get from their friends. Where is the influence coming from? Parents are saying, "We do not have much control anymore because they are getting all this information and all these ideas from elsewhere." Which is it?
Participant C: It is easy to say that, but a parent could easily say, "No more Internet. Gone." Although, the kids can access it somewhere else. It depends. It is in the parents. A lot of parents are really racist, and they do not realize how much of an influence it has on the kids, but it has a big influence.
If the parents are drinking lots and partying lots, the kids are going to do it. It is what they learn at home. If the kids are getting too hounded, they are going to rebel; they are going to do drugs; they are going to do whatever. It gives them a sense of rebellion.
The Chairman: Is it too much freedom for the kids and not enough direction, or is it the opposite: too many controls, being told not to, and they are rebelling?
Participant C: Yes, I think it is more being told not to, because if they are getting told not to, they are going to say, "I am going to rebel."
If the parents are hounding their kids, of course the kids are going to rebel because they are going to say, "Screw this. I do not like my parents." It is all I hear now from kids at school: how much they do not like their parents, how harsh their parents are, how bad this is and how bad that is. They do not realize if they are doing drugs and stuff, their parents are not going to like it, right? It is all in the kids.
Senator Carstairs: One of the rights that you have as a child and as a young person is not to have corporal punishment used against you. Canada still has a law on the statute books that allows corporal punishment.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do you know what "corporal punishment" is?
Senator Carstairs: Hitting; strapping; slapping. You have a right not to be hit, slapped, pushed down the stairs, have your hair yanked, have your ears pulled. Any way you want to describe it, that is all corporal punishment.
We have been held now on two different occasions as being in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child because we still allow corporal punishment in Canada. I would like to hear what you think about that. Do you feel parents should have a right to use physical force against children, and if so, why?
Participant C: I feel they should not because parents will take that way too far; a lot of parents will. They do not know when to stop. Look at two-year-old kids crying, parents just freak out and start hitting, freaking on their kids. If the kid was really bad, they will just take it out hard on them. When parents get angry they are going to take it all out on the kids. They do not know when to stop.
I had a really abusive dad when I grew up, and he did not know when to stop. He would keep hitting and hitting and hitting and would not stop.
Corporal punishment is not a good way; again, it is all in the parents. If the parents are yelling and screaming at their kids every day not to do something, of course the kids are going to rebel and say, "I am going to do it."
If the parents are actually going along with their kids and showing them what is right and what is wrong in the sense of not yelling and screaming, and — actually since the kids are little — teaching them what is right and wrong rather than beating it into them, kids would learn.
Senator Carstairs: Participant B, what do you think about that?
Participant B: I was going to say mostly the same thing, it should not be happening because it is bad.
This girl in my school lied, and she said that her parents beat her up with the belt, so I told my mom, and my mom talked to her mom, and they all got into this big fight. It was really weird. Yes, it is bad; they should not do it.
Participant A: I think that parents should not be able to hit their children. I know some parents do not, and they choose not to, but I think it depends on the person. Some of them do take it too far, and that is not very good for the child when they grow up either, because they may be just like their parents and hit their kids.
Senator Carstairs: What do you feel they should do instead? If they are not allowed to hit their child — and by the way, I happen to agree with you all that it should not be allowed — what other methods do you believe might work? Obviously, everybody needs discipline, including children, and adults need discipline too. What would you suggest would be an alternative?
Participant C: I feel healthy life skills, like cleaning or just doing chores. I do not think that grounding works. That just gets the kids into their room where they freak out, punch the walls. If the parents actually help their kids with dishes or whatever — give them that to do, but the parents actually help with it — kids are going to do it, and they are not going to rebel.
I feel that type of discipline is better than hitting kids or grounding them. If the parent actually makes the kid do chores or go out, if they live on a farm, to feed the animals or do whatever, it gives the kids a chance.
Participant B: Yes, chores and talking to them, not yelling, but instead of hitting, just kind of talking to them and telling them what is wrong.
Senator Carstairs: I have had parents say to me that the reason they do not use grounding is because it actually punishes them: "If I ground my teenager, that meant I had to stay home too." The only way that the child was going to stay in the house was if the mother was there as well.
Then we get involved in a lot of the wheedling that goes on: "Come on, Mom, you cannot do this for three months." Every parent should have enough sense to know they cannot do it for three months. I always figured one week of solid grounding was far more effective than saying I was going to do it for three months and then break down after two weeks.
The reality is that sometimes it can work if parents take away something. My daughter received a speeding ticket. She actually did not get picked up by the police; she got picked up by me, because I happened to be in the car behind, and she did not know. Therefore, she just did not have the car keys for a month. It seemed to be more effective than anything.
Participant B: Taking away something would be good. I get that. My mom just takes away my stereo or something. It works.
Participant D: I was just going to say that these human rights apply to people that are citizens or landed immigrants, and there is also one that says people have the right to practise their culture and things like that.
Sometimes when people immigrate here, maybe in their culture it is okay to use those measures, but sometimes if they are aware that they have those rules to follow where they come from, they never really get to that point here, because the pressure when kids come to Canada is so different. Kids here would say, "Oh, your parents are not allowed to do that?"
It is kind of hard on some of them to decide, because we say it is not allowed, but then they come here and we say, "You can practise your culture, but you cannot do that because these are the laws here."
I do not know. It just comes up a lot. In my courses, we are just going over the Convention on Human Rights right now, and that was one of the major ones.
The Chairman: You have pointed out something very important, and that is that there are conflicting rights, so what are you saying?
I used to be a family court judge, and I would have those parents who had exercise — and not just to slap. In one case, it was a wooden spoon but all over the body, so they were charged with an assault. They said it was okay in their culture. In fact, that is what they were taught; that was acceptable and necessary.
Which rules then: the child's right not to be abused, not to be subject to corporal punishment, or the child's right to their identity and their culture?
Participant D: The right not to be abused. I think it is just different because if they are there with peers that have the same rules, it is easier to follow.
However, when people come to a new place, and their peers have different expectations and follow different things, then they are out of their boundaries and the rules that they would maybe normally follow. Then the kids come here and start hanging out with their Canadian friends and doing the Canadian things, and their parents are not accepting of those behaviours. It is kind of a grey area.
Senator Poy: You brought up the culture of new immigrants. Do you feel it is a good idea, when people apply to come to this country, to let them know what their children's rights are before they land?
Participant D: I think so. I think that would make a big difference. A lot of them come here not knowing, and so something will happen, and then all these people show up at their door saying, "Oh, you cannot do this. It is illegal." They did not know in the first place, so it just causes a lot more distress for the police. Maybe just more awareness of that information is needed before they come, somewhere in the process.
Senator Poy: They probably are not told that; am I right? That is not part of the immigration process, what their rights are and the rights of their children the moment they land in Canada, and I feel that is very important.
Participant C: For sure.
Senator Poy: Also, do any of you know what your rights are as youth? Are you taught in school what your rights are?
Participant D: They do now, after today.
Senator Poy: If you are spanked or hit — talking about corporal punishment — if it really hurts, you will complain to your teacher, complain to somebody. However, a lot of children do not know what their rights are. You have never been taught, and I believe it is very important to have that taught in school.
Participant C: I feel that it has to be taught in school, but parents should also be taught those rights.
Senator Poy: Absolutely.
Participant C: Not only the kids, because the kids can say this, but parents would say, "Oh, they are lying." If the parents actually know, then I think things will change.
Senator Poy: Yes. Of course, I am totally against corporal punishment, but the argument was that teenagers or young people are so unruly today, not like when we grew up, so therefore something like that is really needed.
I want your comments, starting with Participant A. Do you believe that is at all necessary?
Participant A: No. I think that instead of hitting their children, parents should explain why they are in trouble and what they are doing wrong, instead of just hitting them. The children do not know what they are doing wrong, so they can do it again, and they are just going to get in more trouble.
Senator Poy: What about a little kid, what do parents do, someone who is young enough that cannot be reasoned with, say a three-or four-year-old?
Participant A: I think the parent should maybe put them in the corner, take away their stuff, just for a couple days, so they know.
Participant B: I was going to say pretty much the same thing as her. Parents should talk to them instead of hitting them, or take away something. With little kids, give them a time out or take away a toy.
Participant C: Like I said earlier, it is a learning process. If the parents are actually working with the kids on their punishment, if the parents punish the kids to doing chores, the parents help the kids with the chores. While doing the chores, they teach the kid what is right and what is wrong. They talk to the kid while they are working together, rather than just snapping at the kid. They should work with them doing the chore, or whatever they get for punishment, to help teach the kids what they did wrong.
Senator Poy: Do you feel a lot of the problems come from lack of time of the parents because both parents work; they are not there, and when they come home, they want everything to be perfect, and when it is not, they get frustrated?
Participant C: Yes. I notice that, yes. If both parents are working, they are stressed out from work. They do not want to take the time to work with the kid to help the kid learn; they just say, "Go to your room," and that is it.
Participant E: When you mentioned about how people say teenagers are worse these days, I always get a kick out of when my parents talk about the bad things they did, but it is a joke, like the good old times. When they talk about the kids these days, it is totally different — so I think they apply a different lens.
I do believe— and I cannot really say because I am only 23, but I suspect — that one thing that has changed and gotten worse is the gap between generations. I believe that a lot of the issues that we are talking about here, like discipline and even youth input into decisions at their school and different things, is a result of that gap in the generations, because like you say, parents are busy. There is less communication between adults and young people, so there is way more opportunity for these issues to arise and get out of control.
I do not feel teenagers today are any worse. Our social structure, and the way we deal with those, is maybe not as effective as it used to be.
The Chairman: Participant D, would you like to add to that?
Participant D: Pretty much what Participant E said, and also not just with the parents working; a lot of times now, youth are working too — everybody is gone. Family time and time to deal with those kinds of things is limited, which is wrong. That is one big issue now too. It is 12 or 13 now that kids can go to work, so that is another issue. Everyone is working and busy and does not have time for anything.
Participant B: She just said that it could be 13. Some kids last year got a job at the age of 12, but they can only work two hours.
The Chairman: We have gone across Canada, and we have heard the problems facing youth. Participant E, you had said they are no worse now, but I feel there is a difference. What I experienced was different than my parents and than my grandparents.
If you had to say what the single most difficult issue is in your life that you are facing now, what would it be? We have had different groups talk about schools, health, interpersonal relationships, parents, pornography, drugs, et cetera. What would you say is your biggest challenge now?
Participant A: I would say probably school, because that is where, at our age, we spend most of our time and learn and be with our friends.
Participant B: I would say school, because of peer pressure and all the stuff that they want us to do. So yes, I would say school.
Participant C: Pretty much the same: school. Participant B said peer pressure, but kids need to be educated more on how to work with peer pressure, how to say no. A lot of kids do not say no. They have low self-esteem. They need to be taught how to bring themselves up instead of bringing themselves down.
Senator Munson: This is really informative. I believe part of the problem in the 1960s is — as one of the aging boomers — we had a lot of freedom. We fought for it, and now we are trying to control. It is really bizarre.
However, in this discussion that we are having, Participant C, you talked about the racism, what is happening in the school, and how it is not fair to the Sudanese people.
Are there programs? Are people talking to each other? Does a teacher or a principal take two guys who were born in downtown Edmonton and two others from Sudan and then say, "Let's sit down and have a chat about things"? Are those active programs?
The other question is: Are there really serious anti-bullying campaigns going on outside of schools and people sensitizing them? Teachers are not supposed to be babysitters, but just bringing young people together and saying, "Look, let's talk."
Participant C: Yes, there is a lot of that, but a lot of kids will not come forward because they get called a snitch.
With the gangs in Edmonton right now, if a kid snitches on a gang member, the kid is as good as beaten up. That is why a lot of kids will not say anything. They will not even say anything to the principal. They just keep it inside until they blow up.
Then that is the kid that gets suspended. He would not say anything because he kept getting called a snitch or a stoolie, or whatever he got called. He blew up, freaked out on these other kids; he beat the kids up, and now he is kicked out of school because he is scared to say anything.
Senator Munson: Is there any way around that?
Participant C: I feel that with kids, it is all at home. A lot of racist kids, they were taught it from a young age. My dad was really racist, but I found I got over that. I am not racist. It is all in how we grow up.
Senator Munson: However, something happened in your life; a switch went on. You processed all that. You must have been talking to buddies and people saying, "This is ridiculous. What is this? This is crazy. A human being is a human being."
Participant C: Yes, I know, but a lot of kids do not get that. If they are taught it by every one of their family members, that is it. They are not going to learn.
My mom, she was my big support, and she helped me not be racist. She is not racist but my dad was. If both parents are racist, the grandparents are racist, aunts and uncles are racist, this is what the kid learns.
There are a lot of anti-bullying campaigns going on, but it seems like it is not clicking. Kids think it is a joke. It is not graphic enough. If it was more graphic, maybe the kids would get it, but they are making it all kind of fun and games. If it was not so much fun and games, and it was really straightforward and an eye-opener — they have to make it an eye-opener somehow — then that is what I feel would make these issues click with the kids.
Participant B: Yes, it is all about what we learn from our parents. My mom and my dad are divorced, so I do not really see my dad very often because I do not like my dad's wife; she is really mean to me. So yes, it is all about the family and what our moms think. My mom is not racist but my uncle is.
Participant D: Are there campaigns in your school for bullying and racism?
Participant B: In Grade 7 we have this challenge day, and we go for a whole day and learn about bullying and stuff, yes.
Senator Munson: The picture of this country is changing, as you described it in your school. My son just graduated from high school in Ottawa. In schools all across the country, the picture is that a white face may be a minority face.
As a society, we have to accept that. There are no borders anymore in this world for people going elsewhere. I still have hope because in our family, we did sit down. We did not have to say very much because our children were born overseas, and they understood it when they came back.
You are absolutely right about parents. It is all about talking and all about having that time, setting aside not a Friday night but a Sunday night, just chatting. For example, in our home, we tried on Sunday night just to say, "Look, let's just talk. You can even wear your cap. You can sit there and let us just talk." All of a sudden it begins to happen.
Two or three hours has to be set aside because, as you all said, everybody is going everywhere. It does work when we have that family moment, because it does begin at home.
Participant E: In regards to the principal sitting down with these conflicts, my first comment is that principals do not have time with the understaffing at school.
The second is that if there is staff that is designated to take on that role, the people who are comfortable and qualified to address such issues are few and far between. That has been my experience in Saskatoon, where they do not want to address these issues with the kids because they are not comfortable addressing these issues with themselves. It is like we have missed a few steps here; so to expect kids to be able to do that when the adults that they are around do not know how, is asking a lot.
I have found, and I have worked in a school for five years, we always land ourselves in the conversations that everybody is saying, "They said what? You guys are talking about what?" We reply, "Yes, we are talking about that, and yes, we know you do not want to address the issue, but that is exactly what you need to do."
I feel we need to have more value put on going into uncomfortable situations to address these issues and more permission for that to take place; not only permission, but also the expectation for those conversations to take place in the school, and making sure that staff are provided the training they need and the life experience they need to feel comfortable with that.
Senator Carstairs: Participant E, you reminded me, I used to teach sex education — of course, we called it "family/ life education" in those days. It was true; the teachers who felt comfortable teaching sex education were few and far between. The vast majority of them were very uncomfortable, and the kids were more embarrassed for the teacher than they were in terms of learning anything about sex education, because they would say, "Oh, that poor teacher who has to teach that and, obviously, is not very comfortable."
I want to talk to you both and engage you on the issue of privacy, everything from the letters you receive, the emails you receive, and your lockers in school. Do you get the sense that your privacy is, in fact, respected, or do you feel that because you are a kid, parents and teachers can do anything they want to you: they can read anything, they can look at anything, they can examine anything?
Participant C: Yes, big time. That is a big one, with parents especially. If a letter comes from a friend, parents are going to say, "Oh, let me read that." It is like we feel we cannot say no, that they have to read it.
It is the same with emails. Sure, kids can have enough privacy, but how do they know someone on the other end is not reading it, if someone is hacking into your computer and reading it?
Even in school, if the teachers suspect anything, they can break into lockers without permission, which is good, though, because a lot of kids might have drugs or whatever. But still, a kid can go up and say, "This kid has drugs" and it not be true, and then the teacher goes and breaks in. I figure they should investigate, ask the kid and question the kid rather than, boom, go break into his locker.
Participant B: In our school the teachers can only go in our locker if they find out that someone brought drugs, so they do not go in and snoop whenever they want. That is, at least, what they said to us.
Senator Munson: You believe them, right?
Participant B: Yes.
Participant A: I feel that I have a lot of privacy at school, but it is just at home; my mom, she knows all my passwords on my computer, and she can sign into my MSN — my instant messenger — and she reads my text messages. I do not really have very much privacy at home.
The Chairman: Participant A, just to pick up on this point that your mother has your password, part of the problem for parents is — and I guess it will be for kids — there is a great pressure to make sure that children are not subject to pornography and lured into all of this.
When there is a horrific case where a child has been abused and a child is, as I say, under 18, often the parent is faulted for not knowing what was going on with that child. The child has often answered later saying, "Well, I knew what I was getting into up to this point, but it spiralled out of control, and my mind started to work."
Are you saying it is a good invasion but still frustrating, or parents should not do any of that? That is something we, as senators, are going to face in legislation: the ability to control and put curbs on children's private access to a lot of this new technology.
Participant A: I live with my grandparents, but my mom is still one of my guardians. She has this program on my computer where it blocks out any violence, nudity, swear words or anything, so she will know if I am trying to access that. I do not think she should be on my MSN to see my personal conversations with my friends.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Many of the conversations have dealt with what could be described as "competing rights," the kind of right to screen a teenager's access to violence and pornography, your right to say, "Hey, get out of my MSN." It is a huge problem everywhere. There are families who come in from other countries and do not know what the children's rights are in this country, and then the cultures have these competing rights, it is happening everywhere throughout society.
Is there is any place for you in your schools, individually, to get a few other kids together with you — and perhaps a teacher — to start talking about these kinds of issues? They are going to be part of your life for the rest of your life. The stories we have listened to here are where they are today, but they will continue.
I come from Toronto, which within ten years will no longer be a white city; that is how fast it has changed. That is not true, necessarily, in the stockbrokerage houses and the bank towers, but it is true in the city.
What do you think about that idea, about teaching what children's rights are and then maybe branching out to teach some of the parents? They do not know either. What kind of action could you take on this whole problem of competing rights, and (a) knowing your rights and (b) figuring out who else has them? How can you work together? Where can you not work together?
Participant A: We should be taught more about our rights, because before this, I did not really know anything about them, and I do not think my grandparents really do either.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Who is going to be the best teacher?
Participant A: I think probably the teachers at school.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Not you?
Participant A: No.
Participant B: When we got the call to come here, my mom said that she does not know anything about rights, and I do not know anything about rights. I am just learning about it now.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do you think it is an area you could do something about in your school, with a couple of other people and a teacher? You are not the only one who does not know.
Participant B: We could probably get a whole bunch of people who want to know and get some teachers, and we could probably form a class about it and tell the principal.
Senator Nancy Ruth: It would be an interesting experiment.
What do you think, Participant C?
Participant C: Human rights classes in schools would do a lot, where it teaches the students about human rights, but also in colleges or wherever young adults go to learn; they should be taught that too.
I know social workers and others are taught it, but I feel everybody should because then everybody knows human rights. I feel people are not educated enough right now to know anything about human rights.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do you think any of you are curious enough to go on the Internet tonight and look up the rights of children and see what pops up?
Participant C: Oh, yes. For sure.
Senator Munson: That is the bottom line. That is the message of the afternoon, to understand it.
Today, for example, as a new member of this committee, I had to do an interview, so I went to the chair and asked, "What are the main components of the rights of the child?" There were about 46 articles there, and she just talked about the right to be part of a family, the right to have an education, the right to have your voices heard in a court as opposed to being told. They are simple matters.
This is a crash course for me too, but in Grades 7, 8, 9, and 10, if there were courses on human rights across this country, it would help a little bit. One person saved from bullying is good, or one person saved from saying something horrible about somebody else is good. You have a very valid and strong point in saying that because that is an education in itself.
Participant C: Concerning the right to have a family, how many kids right now just got kicked out of EIS, Edmonton Integrated Services? They decided they were going to shut that down, because the head guy decided that all kids should be with their family. How many kids cannot go home to their family and needed that to live? How many kids are on the street right now?
Senator Carstairs: Participant C, could you tell us a little bit about that program?
Participant C: Edmonton Integrated Services is a big group housing project in Edmonton, and the head guy, who just got elected, decided all kids should be able to go home to their parents and that the parents should take the kids back, but how many parents are not willing?
There was no point in shutting that down but they did, and now there are barely any group homes left in the city for these kids. That is the big one; I know that because my brother works for Edmonton Catholic Social Services.
Participant E: Was there any youth input into the decision, the people who were staying at those schools?
Participant C: I do not know. I do not think there was, no.
Participant D: Part of that, too, might be because they just changed the Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act, and that was one of the biggest goals of it, to keep kids with their family or next of kin; but that sounds like a pretty big, drastic move, to say, "Here, let's do it." There is a process.
Participant C: That is what they did. No, that is not right. I know a 14-year-old, my brother's girlfriend's brother, who is out on the street right now, because they decided to shut all the group homes down.
The Chairman: Just a little history on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most difficult area in negotiating in the 1980s was the right-to-a-family clause that had to do with defining a family.
Does it mean going home to biological parents? Does it mean having an extended family; or a community definition of "family," like our Aboriginal people have, saying if a child is taken out because a mother is not functioning, why not consider the grandmother or someone else? That is still family.
The convention did not define "family," but what it said is that every child is entitled to have an environment of a family. You are saying sometimes a foster home, a group home, or a neighbour can give the bonding, the security and the love that a child's own biological parent cannot or will not.
We have to get our society to understand that it may be a very good policy to say, "Do not institutionalize kids. Send them home." However, if they cannot go home, we have to have an alternative that is as good as sending them home, and we do not do that well.
We just learned from being in Regina that that has been the case. We were providing a safe house for children, away from their families when their families were not functioning, but that safe house was not very safe for the children.
It is something we are struggling with, and you have hit the key: we all do well when we trust somebody, when we are with someone we are comfortable with and who nurtures us, and we need that as children especially, but we need that through our lives. If kids do not get it at the start, where do they gravitate?
As one of the kids yesterday said, they go to gangs because they feel comfortable. Gangs are not judgmental; the kids say, "They accept me for what I am, and I am in there." It is not good for us to able to say that the only place a kid feels comfortable is in a gang.
We do not say, "Back to your parent"; we are saying, in the convention, the child has the right to be somewhere where the child is nurtured and gets that security.
Participant C: Yes. As for the gang, when I first got kicked out, I was on the street, and that is what I turned to. It was not a right, but it gave me a sense of security, and that sense of security was wrong because I ended up getting stabbed three times because of that stupidity, which was not good.
If kids are getting kicked out into the street, and they have nothing else, that is what they are going to turn to; that is all I am saying. If they had more group homes, and they had not shut down Edmonton Integrated Services, there probably would not be as many kids in gangs.
Senator Carstairs: We tend to think of the family as being mom and dad and three bouncy, pretty little kids. None of you live in that kind of an environment.
You live with your grandparents.
You live with your mother.
Participant C, I do not know exactly where you live right now.
Participant C: I live in a group home.
Senator Carstairs: How many kids who you are going to school with are in your situation and not what most adults think is the norm, which is mom and dad and three cute little kids?
Participant C: Lots; lots of kids.
Senator Carstairs: Participant B, any idea in your school how many would be in the traditional family and how many would be in your kind of family?
Participant B: Lots of my friends just live with their moms or just live with their dads; none are together, or not very many, in my grade.
Participant A: Most of my friends do live in a group home or with just their mom, but a couple of my friends live with their whole family. One of my friends came from a group home, and she just moved in with her mom; her dad died when she was younger. That is how most of my friends' families are.
Senator Carstairs: Do you believe that is part of the problem, that there is not enough family stability? Obviously, family stability is not any good if one of the partners is beating the children up. That is not stable.
Participant D: I do not feel that it is the buildup of the family, necessarily, but just support for those different family structures. There are lots of supports for certain kinds of families, but there is not a lot of support for all these different types that some people have — like how we grew up, our grandma was there and she just took care of us and those kinds of things. For example, extended families are different. I do not think there are enough supports in place to help those different-structured families.
Senator Munson: Some of the topics we have discussed today have been valuable.
The Chairman: I feel it has been very valuable. Again, I used to do family court, and the hardest part was when we first started the court we said, "We have to listen to the children." I was doing custody cases. The mother and father would both be saying, "They should live with me." Caseworkers would do the reports.
We started with the judge speaking to the children, and I really fought for this, but the first child that came into my chamber to talk to me — and it was in private — I did not know how to talk to that child. I knew how to talk to my nieces and nephews and all of the children around me, but I did not know how to talk to children as a judge, how to help them in that environment.
I had to learn a whole bunch of new skills in talking to kids who were not part of my family and structure. I have a feeling that around this table, all of us have been struggling with that, you talking with us and us talking with you — I am not sure who is suffering more; it is probably us.
We are often accused of talking down to young people, being irrelevant, being moralistic, but even just the language we use is different.
I went away overseas for seven years and when I came back I had trouble talking to adults, because the jargon, the language, had changed; they were talking about things I did not know. Each one of us has to go through that learning process. I feel that is the lesson that I am taking out of today's discussion.
We develop a lot of policies for you: where to house you; what kind of laws you are going to live by; what your parents can or cannot do. All of this is now part of government processes that people are asking for.
We are finding when we develop policies for young people, we have to learn how to put youth into that, because one part of the convention is that the youth voice has to be heard, and that should be in our policies and practices.
It would be interesting to take any five or ten politicians and put them in the room to just talk to you — not where you make submissions and read something, but to talk — and see how comfortable they would be. Maybe our laws would change and our policies would change if we did more of this. That has been very helpful to me.
Do any of you want to make any more comments about this process or about your lives? We do assure you that we are going to take this into account. We are going to reflect a lot about this meeting. We are going to produce a report, and I hope you will see some echoes of what you are saying in that report.
Participant E: It is fantastic that you just admitted that you had to learn how to talk to young people, because in our experience, a lot of times people just are not willing to admit that that is a skill that they might not have, and they have to admit it before they can do something about it.
I like everything that you have just said. With respect to creating more opportunities for casual, normal conversation to happen, the fact that we are here says a lot. These guys did a really good job today, considering they were pulled in last-minute. You guys did really well.
What are some alternatives to this "square" roundtable? What is a more youth-friendly situation? I am really happy with how this went today, but what else could we do? I feel that if this is the start of working toward more opportunities for youth and adults — youth and senators — to work together, that is really exciting and essential if Article 3, 12, and 13 are going to be recognized.
In Participant C's example of those group houses being closed, obviously there was not a structure in place for young people to be consulted with that. How much more prime of an example could we get of a decision being made that affects young people? Cases like that could really be looked at to improve things, at least improve upon those articles.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Senators, our next witnesses are Kristopher Wells and Will Simpson.
Kristopher Wells, Department of Educational Policy Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta: It is a pleasure to have been invited to be here today. I am completing a doctorate in educational policy studies at the University of Alberta. My research area is on sexual minority, youth, and teachers in the public educational system.
I have had the good fortune to have this research funded by the federal government through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In the community here in Edmonton, I direct a youth group called, Youth Understanding Youth. It is the local social support group for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transidentified, and queer youth.
I will talk a little bit about some of the terminology that I use as I go through the presentation today.
I also have the good fortune to work with the Edmonton Police Service and, in particular, their hate-and-bias crime unit, to help educate the police service and members of the public on particular issues regarding the sexual minority community in Edmonton with respect to violence and victimization.
Being at the university provides me with the good fortune to be working with many of what I see as important social institutions that are trying to shape a particular vision of what it means to be Edmontonians, and what it means to be Canadians. I am hoping to share some of that information with you today in a short presentation.
I am from one of the first generations in Canada that has been born free. By that I mean that in 1969 homosexuality was decriminalized. I was born in 1971; therefore, I was not born as a criminal in this country. This has very important ramifications for the sexual minority community in Canada.
We are dealing with many people in our community who have had a legitimate fear of the police and major social institutions. I am working with them to overcome that and understand that we are in a new kind of reality where we are attempting to be more visible, more vocal and more included in our major social institutions.
That is also important to recognize because the next generation, after me, is mostly out and proud now in their school communities, in their families. That has significant consequences for educators, for government agencies, when they have come out at age 14 or 15, which is now the average age. It puts the issue squarely in schools, whereas a decade ago the issue did not even need to be addressed until perhaps post-secondary education or onwards.
We have dealt with many kinds of change, and certainly since 1995 — when the Supreme Court of Canada in the Egan decision recognized for the first time the historic discrimination against this community — we have seen rapid change in Canada. That is change that we all certainly can be proud of as we look at the multicultural and pluralistic nature of our country.
I intend, in the next ten minutes, to share a broad overview of the issue and talk a little on the national scene in terms of research. What do we know about this particular youth community? What have the statistics told us? What are the youth telling us? When we know that kind of information, what can we do to address some of the realities and vulnerabilities of this particular at-risk group?
I am going to share just briefly with you some of the work we have done here in Edmonton and that has a national interest on building a youth leadership and resiliency model.
My research focuses on: How do we move youth from being at risk to being resilient? What are the key protective factors that need to be enabled in their lives? Then we will examine some key gaps and alliances that we might be able to address, and the kinds of supports already in place that sometimes just need a little extra coordination and collaboration to make a big impact.
Will Simpson is going to talk about The Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities philosophy; some of their projects and resources addressing the larger area of diversity, particularly with the focus on public education and in our communities.
I always like to start with defining some of the terminology, not knowing where everyone comes from with their own basic awareness.
When I use the definition or the acronym, "LGBT" or "LGBTQ," it represents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transidentified and queer.
"Queer" is a word that is contested. Some people tell me that it is a word never to be used in public, but it is important to understand this is a word now that the youth are using to describe themselves. It represents more of a fluidity.
The word "queer" actually comes from the Latin phrase torquere, which simply means "to twist," and by twisting, one can look at something differently. It is looking at the fluidity of sexuality and gender not being a simple binary of male on one side, female on the other; heterosexual on one side, homosexual on the other. We know that with binaries, one side is always privileged, and the other side is always subjugated. They are defined in relation to each other.
Thus, "queer" really tries to break apart the binaries and question of what is normal; of what normal means in our society. Importantly, youth like to use this word because it does not fix them as being one thing — as just being a young gay man or a young lesbian woman — and recognizes their desires, their interests might change over the course of their lifetime.
It is also a discipline in academe. Queer studies is beginning to be a strong discipline within sexuality studies, women studies, departments of English, for example. Certainly, there are queer studies in education.
Another synonymous term is, "sexual minority." We know that, through law and legislation, the federal government recognizes three types of minorities in this country: linguistic, ethnic/cultural, and sexual. This phrase is used as more of an encompassing term, particularly in legislation and policy.
It is important to recognize this as an invisible minority; the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transidentified youth may not necessarily be seen in families or communities unless they feel safe in making themselves visible.
Through that revelation, one can say, "This is a person who has trusted me enough to become visible and share this important part of their life with me." This invisibility makes them a difficult group to find and address some of their needs and concerns. It is a double-edged sword. Their safety is sometimes tied to their invisibility, but it is hard to address their safety concerns unless they are visible at the same time.
The research is telling us as well that we know that this particular group is a disproportionate target for violence and victimization. It is often said that homophobia in our society is one of the last acceptable social prejudices that does not necessarily get addressed in our day-to-day lives.
For example, for the past three years, the hate-and-bias crime unit reports that sexual minorities have been amongst the most targeted and victimized groups in the Edmonton region.
We also know this is a significant issue with respect to bullying. Indeed, the federal government's response in the interim report to the United Nations highlighted this particular group as being at extreme risk for bullying and victimization in Canada. More work certainly needs to be done to address that.
Gender identity, with respect to transidentified individuals, is a newer concept. There is not much information or awareness regarding this concept. Basically, "gender identity" is defined as one person's personal sense of being male or female. This may be congruent with their actual biological sex, or it may not be.
We often hear about this as a phenomenon of feeling trapped in the wrong body. People will go to different lengths to bring their inner emotional self in congruence with their biological self. Some will go as far as sex-reassignment surgery; others will simply change their mannerisms, their dress, their appearance.
We are slowly starting to see human rights commissions across Canada recognize gender identity as a protected ground against discrimination. It has now been recognized in Alberta as a protected ground, as I know in Ontario and I believe Quebec as well. We are seeing more and more cases come forward in this particular area.
The importance for youth is that this often places them at extreme risk. The transidentified or transgender community is the most at risk of all the other sexual minorities, simply because they cross two fundamental lines or categories in our society: gender, sexuality, and both combined.
Sometimes we see that this homophobic behaviour, bullying or discrimination is used to regulate young people — or adults in some cases — back into their particular gender roles: "This is what it means to act like a male, this is what it means to act like a female and if you step outside that narrow gender box, we are going to use this language or other means to put you back in there."
If a male is expressing himself as too feminine, then he is called a "fag." If a female is expressing herself as being too masculine in interests or pursuits, she is often labelled a "dyke." These are the most common put-downs used in the youth community and in our schools, unfortunately, at this time.
What do we know nationally about sexual minority youth? In 2004, I worked with Youthography, which is a national marketing company run by Ping Marketing. They did a survey of 1,353 youth, from ages 13 to 29, in every province and territory in the country. In this survey, I had the opportunity to pose ten questions that dealt specifically with sexual orientation and gender identity.
To date, this is the only national research that has looked at the sexual orientation and gender identity of our youth on a large scale across the country. This provides us with baseline data to identify some of these issues.
In this anonymous survey, 3.5 per cent identified themselves as a sexual minority, consistent with other studies. Yet, 7.5 per cent also acknowledge experimenting with members of the same sex, indicating that they did not hold their primary identity as being an LGBT person; although, some of their sexual or erotic experiences, were with members of the same sex.
If those two statistics are combined, roughly 11 per cent of this population is dealing with issues of being — or questioning being — or feeling non-heterosexual, which holds true to the common statistic that states one person in 10 in our society is non-heterosexual. When we work with educators, we often say that in a class of 30, there might be three students in your class who are non-heterosexual. How are the materials that you are presenting addressing their needs and concerns?
We are seeing more awareness, more familiarity in the youth community around these issues. This is reflected by the fact that 58.6 per cent reported knowing an LGBT classmate or co-worker.
Similarly, 62 per cent stated they are comfortable, completely comfortable, or very comfortable with LGBT issues. Thus, we see that shifting demographic where youth in our society are really leading the way on this issue.
We saw the same statistics and results concerning the same-sex marriage debate, where those under 35 were overwhelmingly in favour of same-sex marriage. The resistance came from the older generations.
It is important to note for issues of safety and security, 23.8 per cent witnessed an act of violence or verbal abuse directed toward a person of their own age. In the vulnerable group, the 15- to 19-year-old age group, that rate increased to 27.5 per cent of youth — this includes, obviously, heterosexual youth — who had witnessed an act of violence directed toward a sexual minority.
In 2005, Douglas Janoff, who is a criminologist working with the federal government now, authored a book called Pink Blood: Homophobic Violence in Canada. He traced, from 1990 to 2004, over 100 violent deaths and murders of sexual minority persons in Canada and 355 reported bashings.
He went through all of the known police statistics, archives, and newspaper articles and created a composite profile of homophobic violence in Canada. The results were staggering, examples of some of the most extreme prejudice in terms of violence issued against sexual minority persons. There is case after case of the most horrendous kinds of beatings and murders across Canada.
We know that Health Canada tells us the profile of a gay-basher, someone who attacks sexual minority persons, is typically a white male between the age of 15 and 25.
The research tells us that often this is a particular group that has not had a lot of experience with diversity. They have learned to fear the other person because of their differences, not to celebrate or embrace that person because they are different or they can offer something to enrich our community. We really try to work to see diversity not as a barrier, but as an opportunity for all of us.
Some of the stories behind the statistics indicate that there are very serious consequences for many sexual minority or LGBT youth in our schools and communities. We see a combination of externalizing, outward-reaching behaviours and internalizing behaviours.
Some drop out or tune out of the schools or the support groups in their communities. They turn to drug and alcohol abuse at higher rates than their heterosexual peers as coping mechanisms to deal with stigma, shame, bullying and victimization. Sexual minority youth often experience increased peer victimization.
In some cases, research has demonstrated that when sexual minority youth are attacked, versus heterosexual youth, they have been subjected to such extreme violence and prejudice that they are more often likely to require medical attention because of the severity of the attack — simply due to being a sexual minority.
We know they often withdraw from social and school activities. It is a combination of factors: not feeling accepted, they become alienated, and therefore, become isolated.
A teacher told me a story of a young man in high school, in Brooks, Alberta, who was cornered by a group of boys after school; they held him down and carved the word "fag" into both of his arms. Extreme acts of violence like this occur. This was in the past few years; we are not talking about a decade ago. This is an every day reality to which many of these youth are subjected.
They are also more likely to witness violence as they tend to find very few safe spaces to meet other people, peers their own age; they turn to adult spaces that are not often safe. We know that when youth, regardless of their identity, turn to adult spaces, they are more likely to be victimized. They are more likely to be vulnerable.
In this case, they often turn to the bars. The bars in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transidentified community have traditionally been a kind of fugitive space; the only space where they could go to meet one another, because if they made themselves visible in public, they would be attacked. Slowly, with the legalization of same-sex marriage, we will, hopefully, be creating many more spaces — publicly safe spaces — for people.
There are significantly higher rates of bullying and sexual harassment amongst sexual minority youth. They run away from home more often than their heterosexual peers. Sometimes they are cast out of their home; their families being the biggest sources of discrimination. They often turn to prostitution and/or living on the streets simply to survive.
Research has told us 11 per cent to 35 per cent of street youth are sexual minorities. How equipped are those agencies and groups, who are already dealing with this vulnerable population, to address the realities that many of these people are sexual minorities and need different kinds of programs and services to help them get off street?
The important point is that when they run away from home or turn to prostitution, they remove themselves from key support networks, and key support networks are a critical piece of building the resiliency.
We know they are more prone to depression, increased suicide ideation or suicide attempts. The suicide statistics are absolutely staggering for this community; two to three times higher than that of their heterosexual peers to contemplate or attempt suicide.
In Alberta, a study from the University of Calgary, speaking to the political climate that has been in place for many years in this province, showed that gay male and bisexual youth in the province of Alberta were 14 times more likely to attempt suicide, versus the national average of two to three times. Those are some pretty startling statistics. Sadly, one-third of all sexual minority youth suicides occur before the age of 17.
We know that with the suicide ideations/attempts, there is also a higher incidence of a history of sexual and physical abuse. There are these precursors, signs and opportunities for critical intervention before it is too late.
Importantly, these statistics are not simply related to being a sexual minority person. They are associated with this victimization and lack of supportive environments, whether that is the supportive family environment, the supportive school environment, or other faith-supportive communities as well. There has been this constant failure.
I often say, if young people do not get support at home, where do they turn? They often turn to their schools. However, if they do not get support at their schools, they frequently turn to the streets where they try to find any source of support simply to survive.
A study in British Columbia surveyed 77 youth regarding school-related problems; this is a regional focus but bears out in the national statistics. They found that 66 per cent heard homophobic remarks made by students at their school, 37 per cent reported feeling like outsiders and almost 40 per cent reported dramatically low self-esteem.
Importantly, while we might say this is a negative statistic, it is also positive: 39 per cent told a teacher or school counsellor that they were gay or lesbian. It shows that there is a critical opportunity for intervention. The school counsellors are able to ensure that these youth are finding support; that they are able to have appropriate counselling if they need it or access other kinds of associated resources.
We painted this kind of picture of LGBT youth as being one of the most extreme risk groups in our society, but we also must understand that some of them deal with discrimination, stress, shame or stigma in all kinds of other ways. Some are the perfectionist, A-plus students: "I am going to be the best at this that I can be, so it is one area I can control while everything else feels out of control."
Scholarship winners, class presidents, student leaders or high-performance athletes being involved in so many activities that their parents, friends and family will not question why they are not dating someone of the opposite sex: "Oh, look at Johnny. Well, he is so busy. He is the captain of the football team. He is in the debate club. Of course he does not have time to date." They use these as camouflage or coping mechanisms to hide that one piece of themselves that they dare not name or share.
We have talked about risk. Let us talk about resiliency. What would happen if researchers, government and community workers did not look at youth as "at risk" but looked at them as "at promise"? How would that change the kinds of questions we ask?
Sometimes when we look at youth as being at risk, we "pathologize" them. We are only looking at their deficits when we know resiliency is focused on building their assets. What are the key supports they need in their lives to overcome adversity, to overcome challenges they are going to face?
We know that adolescence — we have all been through — is one of the most difficult times of our lives. We try to adjust, to deal with developmental tasks and challenges and to find out who we are. It is already so difficult, without having to compound it by being a sexual minority or a minority in general, and its associated experiences.
We have seen some very key kinds of ways to help build resiliency, particularly in the sexual minority community.
Positive representations are critical, especially for rural youth who do not have support from their local community groups, media and curriculum. Family and community acceptance is critical. Family is probably the most important resiliency factor in the lives of sexual minority youth and indeed in the lives of all youth.
Positive peer and school relationships are critical — and having that important connection. Resiliency is about fostering an important connection in a young person's life. It might be a family member, a trusted adult, a teacher or a religious leader.
The last resiliency factors are community-specific support networks. Some of you might have heard about gay-straight student alliances forming in schools. They are in schools not only to help provide support for students, but also to help change the larger school culture, to create a school culture that values diversity and inclusion.
Lastly, these strategies come together to help build a resilient mindset, what I call "the resiliency toolbox." Young people today need a variety of different tools to address the multitude of challenges they face.
If they only have one tool in their toolbox, it might help, but it certainly makes it more difficult. We are trying to equip them with the right tools to address discrimination, to address prejudice in their lives so they can be healthy and successful: the right tool for the right kind of job, so to speak.
Will Simpson, Executive Director, The Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities: I have been a principal for over 30 years. When I took on this position, I found many of the issues Kris was talking about. I would lose students because of bias and prejudice, and I could not get them back. Once I lost them to the streets, there was no way of getting them back. We came up with projects, ideas and goals to have a better understanding of and respect for each one of us. That is what I want to talk about in a global issue.
Kris talks about the "invisible minority," and he does better than anybody else I know; he can tell you what happens and what it feels like, thus you get a feeling of being in Kris' shoes. It is a terrible place to be. Can you imagine a person going through junior high, through puberty, and through different stages and having nobody accept them, including family? We know that the family network is one of the strongest.
When we deal with programming, we try to include not only the school, but also the community. We do a lot of reserves, and we have had great success. We know that we cannot just go into a school and make change. Though it is very important that students have somebody to talk to when they come in, it is more important to deal with the community, including the family. That is the key to success, in my opinion: The whole community and school are approached hand in hand.
We have strategies, overall strategies, we also support curriculums; we use provincial curriculums. We are very fortunate; the Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities went national last June, so we are really feeling great about this. However, different regions will see the success and failure of different incentives, depending on the people. It is all about people.
We have developed a curriculum. We believe only in creating a comprehensive program as hit-and-miss really does not work; it is a way of losing.
We developed core subjects and core topics with which to deal, and respect has to be included. Young people's self-esteem is very fragile, and needs constant attention. Diversity creates success, but it is necessary to prevent prejudice; prejudice with religion, race and faith. It is a difficult experience for young people to go through, and a lot of them have anger.
When going through puberty, anger goes up and down, spikes this way and that. Everyone who has sons, daughters or grandchildren knows there are certain days that certain subjects should not be broached. Parents choose your battles when raising their children. I know, with my sons, that is what I do; I choose which battle I am going to win today. If I cannot win it, I am not going to go with it. I have to make sure that the balance is there in this area.
One issue I am so concerned about, as is Kris, with diversity, is this bullying business, this prejudice that comes out, especially for invisible minorities. It is terrible and should not be tolerated in schools.
Many of us, as principals, would not tolerate it; however, it would go back into the community. It has to be the two-pronged approach as soon as we are out of the school and into the community; whenever possible, not resolving conflict or disagreement in assertive punishment. It has to be done in a vocal manner.
There are four strategies that we believe are successful: attachment, altruism, achievement and autonomy. These are the strategies that make it work between schools. If a young person is doing well and achieving in school, this really helps their self-esteem.
Young people have to believe they are special, autonomous. They have to know they can stand on their own. They also have to be attached to somebody. In my Native communities, these are the grandparents. They are the most wonderful people out there, and many times they raise 20 or 30 kids, sometimes not even their kids and grandkids, but they are doing it nonetheless. They believe in the future, that there are goals to be had, and I strongly believe we have to help empower our younger people to believe in the future.
This is where the idea of respect comes in, respect for somebody's faith, religion, culture and diversity. I feel it is all about believing, respecting and accepting other people, and it is how we do it. Prejudice can sometimes be passed down from generation to generation.
My grandmother, bless her heart, was a true Scot, but if you said the word "English," she would just about blow a gasket. Boy, was she prejudiced against the English-speaking people. To this day, I could not have changed her personality.
There are these long-term prejudices that are so hard to get out of a family. It is hard to deal with people, as Kris was saying, who have a real meaning or a real depth to their prejudice. We call this "the paradigm shift," to be able to move from one area to the other. That is why it is so important for us to work with young people before this paradigm is set, to make it shift.
We approach it in this way: We do problem-solving, ways of getting around things. We have a five-pronged approach of how to problem-solve almost any problem, including some math problems.
Viewing diversity as an asset is important — Kris said that very well. If it is turned around, if faith, religion and culture are turned into an asset, then it is not seen as a deficit anymore; it is seen as something that is good. Our perspective is really important.
We look at matters from a world view. We know that in our society, especially Canadians, we are such a special people because we are the result of all peoples coming together.
In Canada, that is why I have to commend the senate for undertaking the rights of children. It is a huge step. It is a step probably only Canadians could take — and maybe even take it one step further — because in many cultures, this is impossible to do. When the senate committee came for the rights of children, I could not commend you more.
We have tried to support what the senate is doing in so many ways. We read the report over, and feel it is a wonderful report. It talked about what was important. We wanted to support you, encourage you to continue with what you are doing. Thank you for inviting us. We especially wanted to give you a flavour of Edmonton, which is a wonderful city, with lots of great changes happening and more that can still happen. Children still need the right to be protected, and we have lots of great changes happening.
We wanted you to take this with you; take a leadership role in implementing international human rights obligations — I believe Canada is the leader in this — to be compliant with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I work with many United Nations Millennium Development Goals schools that set the goals from the educational process within the UNESCO. It is a fantastic one. We could lead the way in that as well.
The inclusion of diversity is the hardest. The invisible minority, which Kris talked very well about today, is the issue that seems to be the hardest to deal with.
When you hear Kris talk, you could say, "Of course. That makes absolute sense to me. Why would this boy, anybody, be carved up with the word 'fag,' and for what reason? For no special reason, other than that people did not understand where he was coming from."
I love the idea of a children's commissioner. That is a great plan because there would be somebody to keep us on track — that is wonderful.
Finally, the federal government is taking ownership of the rights of the children. This is kind of our last one; we have covered everybody else's rights, and now it is time for the kids to get in there too.
My compliments to the Senate for inviting us here today.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Kristopher, thank you for coming and doing this. It is good for all of us to hear it.
I want to respond to your phrase, "positive representations are critical." I sit as the only out lesbian in the senate and probably one of three or four gay senators, but I did not find much in your presentation that had anything to do with me.
Your statistics around violence, I would like to know what the gender breakdown is, the beatings, the bashings, the going to the bars. In Toronto, my hometown, we can barely keep Slack Alice's open; one bar for women in a city of 3.5 million people.
If you could just go through that again and do it by a gender breakdown, and do not forget us. Do not forget me.
Mr. Wells: Absolutely. One of the things we deal with is the traditional lesbian invisibility that is within the larger community. We see, particularly in high schools and with young people, that most of the violence is directed toward young men, simply because young lesbians or questioning women are often seen at the service of masculinity. They are seen as an idealized fetish of desire.
It is not a threat to a young person's masculinity to see two women kissing, but it is a threat to see two men kissing, or to be seen as objects of affection because it is a direct threat to them, their own identity. They do not have to call their masculinity into question by seeing expressions from young women.
We see that the weapon of sexism is the weapon of homophobia. We often call a young man, who acts more feminine, a sissy. It is as if being feminine is something bad. They are constantly bombarded with these messages that having feminine characteristics or expressions is the worst thing a male can do, and we just need to break that apart.
One of the most important things that elementary teachers can do or parents can do is help break apart this notion of a rigid male-and-female binary with ascribed characteristics, those little gender boxes that we try to socialize our young people into. There is a real challenge.
We also find that with young women, there is a real challenge around finding resources that speak to their own particular needs. They become forgotten, oftentimes because the statistics are so horrendous for the young males in our communities.
It is nice to see more research is being done, especially in terms of health care and HIV/AIDS education, to address a lot of these absences. Other absences include bisexuals. There is a large invisibility around bisexuals, and we are only beginning to really understand transidentified issues. There is a whole host of policing, housing, social and medical issues for that particular community as well.
We really need to work together as a community and not be pitted against one another in the sexual minority community. We need to work as a group to understand that our oppressions are linked together.
Our oppressions as a sexual minority community are also similar to the oppressions that ethnocultural minorities or linguistic minorities are facing. Minorities really need to stand together and say, "We are here to support one another, regardless of our differences," because discrimination is often based on that power and that privilege.
With respect to bullying, we know that there are specific gender breakdowns as well. For example, young women tend to bully by alienation, by exclusion, where young men tend to bully in more direct and violent kinds of ways.
There is interesting research that talks about this being a neurobiological predisposition now. They have actually done MRIs of bullied brains and non-bullied brains and have been able to track a difference.
There is fascinating research to show that being bullied actually affects our neural pathways and our abilities to make connections, our abilities to build resilience and, ultimately, our abilities to learn. If any person, regardless of who they are, does not feel safe in a school or community, they are not going to be able to learn effectively.
I hope I have answered a little of your question. I can get specific statistics back to you.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I just want to encourage you to keep making the breakdown. This report does not differentiate between the girl child and the boy child on any issue as well as I would like it to.
I remember the fight of how the "L" got to be at the front of that phrase. I have been around too long. It scares me to see it happening again.
Senator Poy: This comment is for Mr. Simpson. You talked about your organization, and I am wondering what kind of specific programs you have and also how effective you have been in getting them into the schools and actually having them work and also into the community here.
Mr. Simpson: I can say this because I had just started, and I can tell you the past record so it will not look like I am blowing my own horn.
We call it the "SACSC" for short; it is our father's name for what we do. In our organization, the Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities, SACSC, we have had great success because we have had to do it through research grants. We work through the Canadian International Development Agency and through National Crime Prevention. They have really nice, tight guidelines for success.
Everything we do is researched. I work with a researcher. We start with a survey at the beginning, then with interviews; we do our work, and then we see how it is at the end. Many of these projects are successful.
I will give you an example of one that was not. We did a whole workshop at Wabasca, which is the central north of Slave Lake from Edmonton. It is a wonderful native community five hours away from here with some absolutely wonderful people.
We got into the elementary junior highs; we made a difference. We got into the community; we made a difference. But we could not get into the high school, and we had to rethink what we were doing.
From that experience, we have changed what we do in high schools, and now we do it by youth action. This is our message: "High schools, junior highs, you know what to do. You know what your issues are. You find them and deal with them, and we will empower you to help everybody else. We will help show you how to get involved with it, how to meet with the media, how to get involved with other students. You take whatever issue it might be into your school, and you just inflame it and go with it."
That is what we are doing right now with three of our workshops that we are doing together, and I am seeing tremendous results happening.
We met with schools just a few minutes ago — just before I got here — and they were really fired up, these young people, to really make a difference, and that is where I believe we can really make a change. We have an elementary curriculum that I am always rewriting and will probably rewrite until the day I stop writing anything; new materials always come in, and we have to keep on adding and adding.
We have a diversity series, thanks to Kris, who is an excellent writer as well as speaker, and he has helped us so much with our diversity series so that now we are on the leading edge of the diversity area. Without Kris, we would have never been close to that.
We talked about diversity. We talked about racism. We have a large East Indian population in some of our communities in Edmonton, which is an area we are in right now; the one I am working on with the principals and the community together, with the community leagues.
Where we fail, we sometimes learn more. We have been in operation for 11 years, so we now understand what to do and how to do it. Presently, each one of our projects is a kind of a word-of-mouth-activity. So one reserve would talk to another, and our First Nations people will talk to each other.
I often get phone calls from a cousin or somebody from one reserve asking if we can come up and do the same thing we did at Wabasca. I will tell them that it was successful in two areas but not all. Knowing that, they still want to our help. That is how we get information around.
Senator Poy: Do you get the young people involved in your program so that they are actually advising you how to run them?
Mr. Simpson: Yes. The youth-action program is the one in the high schools. Of course, in Kris' area, where he is dealing with the youth, that is exactly what they do. The collective mind is much better, and there is nothing better than teaching somebody else how to learn what needs to be done. Yes, youth leadership is an important part of our components to making a change.
Senator Poy: You mentioned about going into the reserves. What about in Edmonton? Are you very active in the schools in Edmonton as well?
Mr. Simpson: We are. Right now, we have 14 schools that we are working with in and around Edmonton. Of those 14 schools, five are high schools, and we do a different project with each one. It would be so easy to write a grant and have everyone do the same thing, but that is not the right way to do it.
The right way is to find out what the students need and then we train them. We teach them how to facilitate, how to run workshops. We do not teach them what to do because they have got "what" down pretty good; we teach how.
Senator Poy: The schools have to come to you to invite you; you do not go to the schools. Is that how it works?
Mr. Simpson: It is a kind of weird situation how relationships happen. Somebody will know somebody, and they just phone us. Or I will know somebody, and I know that school is working on this.
In fact, today one of our Catholic schools, our separate schools — in Alberta and Saskatchewan, we have public and separate schools — had an issue. I knew they had a great student council, powerful, and they were looking for solutions. I met with the councillor today and she said, "This is exactly what we were looking for."
I knew somebody, she knew somebody and the next thing we know, this came about. I believe this is going to be a hugely powerful one, because these are the leaders of that entire school. They are looking for something to get their teeth into. I am really excited about this one. It is Austin O'Brien, here in Edmonton, that we have just set up.
Senator Poy: How do you get into the communities? You mentioned about schools and communities. Do you go to community groups?
Mr. Simpson: Yes. We do an awful lot of community groups. This is where sometimes closed communities or small towns benefit.
In Brooks, Alberta, you probably heard about the big packing plant issue. We cannot get workers in Alberta, so we go all over the world to find workers.
Unfortunately, the workers that came from other countries got caught into this union/nonunion area, and it was really hard; it divided the community right down the middle, in a beautiful community of Brooks, just close to the Montana border. It was very divisive, so we went down and we taught some people in the community. It is better if the facilitators can come from the community versus some expert.
We trained the facilitators, and now we have two or three really good facilitators, who we keep in touch with all the time to monitor how they are doing and if we can do anything to help them.
They wanted a survey to see if they were making a difference, so we wrote a survey and told them to try it and see how it goes. They are working with people such as bus drivers, support staff in schools and the people who run the movie theatre, and they are teaching the community facilitating through that way; they use whatever network they can get their hands on.
Another really good network, and group to meet in the community, is early childhood: parent groups, new mothers.
The Chairman: You and I will have to talk about that project in Brooks. It sounds very familiar to a project in Johannesburg by an institute approaching it the same way. I do not know if you are aware of them, but it is interesting, so it has some international appeal as well.
Senator Carstairs: You reinforced for me that, of course, the most important contribution a teacher has is to teach self-esteem, whether it is done by history, math, or language arts, but they teach self-esteem.
One of the concerns I had, and it actually builds on Senator Nancy Ruth's question, is the issue that girls are becoming more and more violent. That concerns me because they will now start to identify the lesbian population within their community.
In the past that did not happen. There was an attempt to identify the gay community; there was not an attempt to identify the lesbian community. They were not always correct in their identification, but they thought they were because there was this perception that if a boy exhibited female characteristics, they had to be gay, which we knew was not true. I am talking about teaching in the 1960s, 1970s, and the early 1980s.
How are you dealing with this issue that there is also a changing culture among young women, and how will this impact on the life struggle of the lesbian young person?
Mr. Simpson: I believe, like you, self-esteem is everything. However, the other factor that needs to be brought along with self-esteem is that to have a strong self-esteem is good but not so strong that respect for other people is being affected.
They have to find that balance, and that is what leadership is. Leadership is not being the bossiest person in the room; it is actually listening to people in the room, just like you are doing here. You are the strongest leaders we have in Canada because you have a great ability to listen to people.
That is what we have to do, and then support them — and show good leadership in the schools too. They must learn to practice what they preach. They cannot just say it to one person and then go out and do something else. They have to lead the life of tolerance, understanding, respect and diversity.
Most leaders usually have a hero or a heroine whose values or behaviour they model, and I believe that that model has to be attainable.
In a lot of cases for young people, it is their parents, but if they do not have a parent that can be a hero, it can be a grandparent; and if not a grandparent, it can be a teacher. In those areas, we have to keep public education very strong.
Although we have the ability to have counsellors within schools in Alberta, unfortunately, we have lost a lot of our counsellors. In one way, that has been very hard on us because we have not had the training. Yet, in another way, every teacher became a counsellor almost immediately. Perhaps that was an advantage, but all principals should have more training in that area too.
Mr. Wells: I will just pick up on that. Self-esteem — and self-esteem is a very individualistic concept — is often measured by us comparing ourselves to others.
Some people are talking about the need to not only focus on developing self-esteem, but also what they are terming "social esteem": how one is being seen and valued in the community, the importance of being heard and validated as an authentic, contributing member.
Part of my teaching philosophy is to approach any group or classroom as a community of learners; to really emphasize that when one member of that community tunes out or drops out, the entire community loses, because now we have lost access to that person's information, their talents and their gifts that they could share and that the whole community could benefit from and be enriched by.
Thus, the challenge is how to go about encouraging or fostering people to share those different gifts and talents and recognizing that they come in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes we just need to provide extra support to help them shine.
To your question about the bullying, the girl-on-girl bullying, Debra Peplar and Wendy Craig have done some fascinating research out of York University and Kingston, and they hold a National Research Council's Centre of Excellence funded, oddly enough, by Industry Canada to do this kind of work.
Responses to stress are biologically different in the genders. The male response is often fight or flight, and they will deal with aggression, it is often said, in the schoolyard. They will fight it out or they will resolve it and walk away as friends, and it will be done; it will be left there.
Females look for relationship in the concept called, "tend and befriend." It is more about how this person fits in with their social network; where do they make those personal connections. It is much more about relational experiences.
We must strengthen those important peer-to-peer relationships. We need to be working with youth to help them understand their differences.
Particularly, this is one of our obligations in Canada, as we are only growing more and more diverse and we need a greater level of understanding — I believe diversity is very often dealt with at a superficial level. It can be about linguistic diversity; sometimes it is about ethnocultural diversity; the odd time it is about religious diversity.
However, the area of sexual diversity is often ignored; particularly in schools, because they do not realize they have the support from their administration to address these issues.
Therefore, it leads to these problems where young women can freely target other young women that they suspect as being lesbian or gender-atypical. As you said, it does not matter what the language is, they are not fitting into the definition of the "norm": what it means to be a girl in this particular society or this particular community.
There was an example from New York City of two young women from another country who were walking in the subway holding hands, and they were targeted and beaten because a group of teens thought they were lesbians.
This is a huge issue. We need to have the policy and the directions in place to empower teachers and community members, first, to talk about the issue and feel comfortable using the language to identify what is going on, and then, to start to use some of the programs so they can actually make a difference.
This is why I am really grateful to be able to work with The Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities because they have not backed away from that issue.
In fact, their series of guidebooks was submitted to the Alberta Government, and included one resource for sexual minority students and the government said they would accept all but that one guidebook. The SACSC stood up and told them that they could not have any of them unless they accept them all, because this is a key component of diversity.
We need more people willing to stand up and recognize that; sometimes just empowering them through the statistics is all that is needed. Once people understand what is really happening, they want to make a difference. We can empower them through the statistics, through policy, and through the practices that are out there.
We do not need to reinvent the wheel. There are many wonderful programs happening across the country. The Toronto District School Board has been a leader in this country. We see the Vancouver School Board now being a leader, and that is trickling off to Victoria, Winnipeg, and here in Edmonton.
The momentum is beginning, and I believe that with the legalization of same-sex marriage, a new social legitimization has been accorded to sexual minorities in Canada, where same-sex parented families are going into their schools now and saying, "How is this school and this curriculum reflecting the diversity of our lives and those of our children? What are you going to do to ensure we are included?" At the same time the students are in their schools demanding that they be seen, heard, respected, and that they be safe.
We see a trend where high school students are taking their schools and school boards to human rights tribunals. There have been cases across the country, and the most powerful case came out of B.C., where they have set a kind of checklist so school boards can say, "If you do not follow these guidelines and do your due diligence to make sure your school is a nondiscriminatory environment, particularly for sexual minority youth, you are going to be found liable, and the cost is not an issue or argument we are going to accept." Therefore, cost cannot be used as an excuse not to implement these programs regarding a student's health, wellness and well-being in their school.
I appreciate the questions and comments that we do need to do more, particularly with respect to — as we are starting to understand — the distinct differences between bullying, aggression and violence between genders and how those play out. We need to have different kinds of supports and strategies to match what we are finding in the research. Unfortunately, the research is only just beginning.
Senator Carstairs: My only new concern, I have to say, is that in the same-sex marriage debate, it was not just an age difference; it was also an ethnic difference. There were certain ethnic groups that, quite frankly, were very vocal in their opposition to the passage of this legislation.
It was interesting because they themselves were being discriminated against, and yet they were not prepared to be broader in their interpretation. What kind of specific work are you doing with that kind of diversity?
Mr. Simpson: Working with youth; when we work with youth, we sometimes cannot correct what is, but we can correct what should be, and that is where we can have an effect on the future.
When we did all the projects and we considered what would really make a difference, our youth-action projects and our globalization, we found when other youth get in contact with other youth around Canada or around the world — even across the street — they have a better understanding and tolerance of what it is that makes us the same and what makes us different.
Unfortunately, sometimes our faiths, our religions, and our beliefs are based on traditions, and sometimes those traditions do not include diversity. They enrich what is not diverse because they want to show what is different in a negative light, and that is unfortunate.
I hope this will change through our youth, through our young people, and our grandparents — our grandparents also seem to be more understanding. When one gets to the other side of 50 or 60, one often looks back and sees things from a clearer perspective.
When I work on reserves, I tend to always gravitate to the grandmas and grandpas because they have been there, and they seem to be most tolerant. They have gone past even the words of wisdom. They just look at you and they listen, and they seem to know. That is why I feel young people really connect with their grandparents, sometimes more than their own parents, because they have been there.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Actually, you already answered my question. My question was if you have been into First Nations communities. There are a lot of suicides, gang beatings, and such where they are not being accepted. So you have answered my question. Thank you.
The Chairman: You did talk about bullying, and I believe in the context of only a bit of the work in the school, and we heard about gangs and others.
Can you identify if bullying is the issue of the day? Bullying was around in my time too, in different forms and maybe for different reasons. What is the single most difficult issue in the schools? I know you are working on five areas, but even broadly, is it bullying, is it gangs, is it drugs? What is it? Or can you narrow it down?
Mr. Simpson: I will give you my personal experience. The reason I am executive director is because one of my sons decided he did not want to listen to his dad, which I know is a novel thought — a son not wanting to listen to his dad. He wanted to try the world of gangs and drugs, and it was a terrible world in which he lived. I thought I lost him; I did not.
How we reach each person is with each other person, and we bring them back.
They released a huge report on crystal meth yesterday in Alberta. It is a terribly pervasive drug because it is so addictive so quickly, and it has been laced into almost every other drug so that you get hooked easily. There are many unfortunate people who get hooked on it; it is so easy to get, so easy to make, and it is the evil behind of a lot of the issues we see.
We see it in schools when somebody does not have a strong self-esteem. They try to find something else in their lives, so they look for other things, and often they turn to drugs, alcohol, and gangs. Gangs are their social institution when they do not have the family or support system upon which to rely.
To my thinking now, if they have at least one support system, whether it is a father, a mother, or a grandparent, some day they are going to see the light and come back to that support system. Hopefully, they are still alive to do this.
We can look at how all these areas are intertwined. Self-esteem leads to use of drugs or experimenting. Gangs are the social fabric, upon which people rely. We are such social creatures, and at that age, we need so much attention, and if we can find it within the gang, that is where we will go; if we can find it in the use of drugs, that is where we will go.
It is a very convoluted area, and we have to always bring it back to tolerance, understanding, caring and being there, because we do not know when they are going to come back. We hope they do.
The Chairman: If I am reading you correctly, what you are saying is, it is not so much what marginalizes a person into it; it can be any one of the factors.
Mr. Simpson: Yes, it could be. It could be a lot of different factors that put someone into that area.
In fact, when I see people come out of it, I think, "You are such a clear thinker. You are such a wonderful person. What happened to you?" They must think, "What did happen to me?" They have a hard time reflecting on what it was; trying to pinpoint if it was one single event that pushed them over.
When Kris and I first started talking about this, I talked about the traumatized child. As a principal, I could walk down a hall and I could feel if a child had been abused almost instantly. I trusted that gut feeling until the end. It would be not what these people said or did; it was how they acted. They were totally different than they were before. That one day makes the whole difference.
That was a tragedy. At one of my inner-city schools, it was so pervasive that I did not have anybody that was not abused. I wondered what direction the world was going in that every young person was in this situation.
This is, again, related to the socioeconomic area where these people lived. They were pushed to the side, everybody was on welfare, there were multiple families living together; it was a terrible situation. Drugs and alcohol make people lose their sense of what is right, and when they have no hope, they do not care anymore.
I would see families that were wonderful families, but when one of the two parents drank and they lost their ability to reason, then the children were abused, either sexually or physically.
The rebuilding of these children took so long. They really needed to be with us at that time; they would follow us around just to be with somebody that would not hurt them. Kids have an innate ability to find these people. It is a special skill that they have; they are able to relate to us.
I do not know whether I answered that very well.
The Chairman: No, thank you, you did. We affirmed what other witnesses have said, which is very helpful. You have broadened our debate and made it more inclusive on some issues, which is very good.
We have come to the end of a long day. It was an excellent session with a lot of information. We thank you for coming and sharing the information and putting the issues before us. I hope that some of what you have said will echo through our report.
The committee adjourned.