Day after day we absorb the details of a heart-stopping story about children who asked for help and badly needed help, yet could not be helped. The Shafia murder trial in Kingston, Ont., has become a drama about the frustration of teachers, social workers and police officers who glimpsed a family crisis and found themselves helpless to do their jobs.
As Christie Blatchford has eloquently reported on this site, the authorities in Montreal were in touch with the family well before the alleged murders. There was obvious trouble but it was a difficult file. Girls might speak freely about their wretched lives when talking to a social worker, then clam up in the presence of their parents. The parents did not welcome outside intervention. Everything was fine, they said. So the official helpers silently closed their files and walked away.
No doubt the would-be professionals who saw conflict and did nothing will feel badly about it for years to come. But the main burden should not rest on them. The cause was far more general: Our collective attitude toward immigrants. It was self-conscious, self-righteous Canadian pride that failed.
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The agencies and school never took the abuse seriously. Instead of banning sports equipment – they should be paying attention to the disaster that is occurring in families conflicted by “old country” attitudes and the desire of the children to assimulate into Western society. If you do not come from the visible cultural minority, you are hauled before a government agency. Everyone was “cowed” by the threat of insensitivity to “the other”. How dare the majority impose their values on our medieval, paternalistic, cultural mores. Abuse is abuse no matter what colour it comes in.