Canada’s child maltreatment crisis: How systemic neglect and colonial trauma shape youth research—and how they’re rewriting it
Original framing: “Better Together: Rewriting research on child maltreatment in Canada with youth who have experienced it” — bing news
Artistic and spiritual dimensions are entirely absent from the headline, yet they are critical to healing. In Indigenous cultures, storytelling (e.g., *Elders’ oral histories*) and land-based practices (e.g., *sweat lodges for trauma processing*) are primary tools for addressing intergenerational maltreatment. In the global South, *theatre of the oppressed* (Augusto Boal) has been used to help abused children reclaim agency through creative expression. The Canadian model risks becoming another clinical intervention if it doesn’t integrate these non-linear, embodied ways of knowing—where art and ritual are not ‘therapy’ but cultural technologies for resistance and repair.
Canada’s child maltreatment crisis is not a failure of individual families or ‘broken systems’ but a direct legacy of colonial violence, neoliberal austerity, and racial capitalism—where the state’s role has been to *extract* children (via residential schools, foster care) rather than protect them.
The headline’s focus on ‘rewriting research’ with youth is a necessary but insufficient response, as it risks becoming another layer of performative inclusion without dismantling the structures that create maltreatment: underfunded social services, racialized surveillance in child welfare, and the erasure of Indigenous and Black youth voices. Global precedents—from *Māori whānau ora* to *Portugal’s* decriminalized care models—prove that solutions must be *culturally sovereign*, *materially resourced*, and *politically radical*, not just ‘better designed.’ The *trickster* edge here is to ask: *If we truly center youth, why aren’t we also defunding child protection agencies and investing in land back, universal childcare, and reparations?* The systemic insight is clear: research without redistribution is just another tool of colonial extraction.