A new Canadian report says warning signs raised by family members were not met with adequate protective action in the deaths of eight children across five cases.
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A new report on child murders released Thursday says warning signs were present before each of eight child deaths and were not met with adequate protective action, highlighting what it describes as institutional failures and dismissals of safety concerns raised by mothers.
The analysis, drafted by the National Association of Women and the Law and law professors at the University of Sherbrooke, examines eight deaths in five separate cases. It argues that in all of the cases, family members expressed concerns about children’s safety and repeatedly reached out to police and family courts.
In one 2019 case in Granby, Que., the report says a seven-year-old girl was found unconscious in her room and later died in hospital. The child had been placed in her father’s custody after being raised by her paternal grandparents.
According to the report, the child’s grandmother had warned authorities that there was a serious risk of sexual abuse. It says she later lost custody after being perceived as hostile for reporting the dangers the girl was exposed to while in her son’s care.
The report identifies additional alleged failures in the youth protection system in that case. It says the director of youth protection did not push for home visits, and that no action was taken after the girl was removed from school for a month.
The report also points to criminal proceedings connected to the death. It says the child’s stepmother was found guilty of manslaughter and false imprisonment and that the father pleaded guilty to false imprisonment.
The report’s authors are scheduled to present the findings at a press conference on Parliament Hill Thursday morning, with Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner joining them.
Hepfner, who has introduced a private member’s bill aimed at curbing parental alienation claims, says the proposal responds to the way those concepts are used in Canadian custody disputes. The bill would direct courts, with some exceptions, not to consider allegations that a spouse has, or is likely to, deliberately manipulate a child to become estranged from or resist contact with the other parent.
The report argues that the concept of parental alienation is frequently invoked in court to explain why a child resists seeing a parent and to cast doubt on allegations of domestic violence. It says that when institutions treat a child’s resistance or a protective parent’s warning signs as manipulation rather than as indicators of danger, contact with an abusive parent may be maintained or imposed, increasing the child’s vulnerability.
Hepfner’s bill would also amend the Divorce Act. It would impose new requirements on lawyers to screen for signs of family violence during divorce cases, and give judges additional tools to identify the existence and impact of coercive control on children. The bill would also allow, in some circumstances, children to express their preferences to a judge in a custody dispute.
For Canadian families, the report’s central focus is on how safety concerns are received and acted on across multiple points in the system, including child protection decisions, police responses, and family court proceedings—areas the report says were not aligned with the risks described by concerned relatives.
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