Social Workers Forced Indigenous Girls To Have IUDs Implanted
Social media has been astir recently over allegations that Social Workers in British Columbia have been forcing Indigenous girls to have IUDs implanted against their will.
The claims were brought forward by Breen Ouellette, a Métis lawyer, on Twitter on May 21, 2021.
Ouellette, whose claims have not yet been verified, alleges that children as young as young as nine years old have, within the last decade, had social workers coerce or force them into having the procedure done so as to mitigate risk of pregnancy from statutory rape they may face in the foster care system.
As of writing, the BC Representative for Children and Youth has not received any reports of this activity, but noted that she is “shocked by this allegation and deeply concerned about the traumatic impact such an experience would have on a child or youth.”
While not confirmed, these allegations would simply be another piece in the massive puzzle that is Canada’s ongoing attack on Indigenous people.
While Canada portrays itself much like a kinder, more multicultural version of the United States with far less baggage, the truth is that Canada is simply — for one reason or another — better at sweeping its wrongdoings under the rug.
Until recently, most Canadians had never even heard about Indian Residential Schools — a system by which Indigenous children were forcibly removed from parents so that their culture could be eliminated and they could be “civilized.”
Similarly, the recent report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found that Canada’s actions, or lack thereof, that allowed and continue to allow Indigenous women to go missing or to be murdered at disproportionate rates to constitute genocide.
I could go on and on about the atrocities committed against Canada’s Indigenous population — there have, after all, been entire books written on the subject. I won’t digress that far, but I will emphasize the fact that many in the Indigenous community and outside of it consider Canada’s genocide to be ongoing.
This ongoing genocide includes forced or coerced sterilizations of Indigenous women that continues to this day.
Therefore, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that perhaps agents of the government of Canada acted in this matter to force underage girls to have IUDs implanted.
It should be noted that this would be against British Columbian law, yet this does not mean these events did not occur.
Ouellette is urging anyone who might have experienced this to contact the Representative for Children and Youth in BC and I would strongly agree with his sentiments. The people who have dealt with these innocent children in such an egregious manner, breaking codes of ethics and laws in the process, should certainly be brought to justice. If Social Workers were concerned about rape within the foster care system, they should have evidently not placed children in these homes and also should have reported perpetrators to the police as opposed to “mitigating risk” by having unwanted medical procedures performed on children.
Until serious action is taken by Canada’s government, atrocities such as these will continue to happen and continue to go unreported. I, for one, am thankful we are learning about these misdeeds at all in the first place.
