WATCH: The mother who fought the Children’s Ministry and won in a horrendous child abuse case is speaking out tonight, and is worried about a new letter from the government. John Daly has her story.
Weeks after a judge found staff with the Ministry of Children and Family Development violated a court order and allowed a father who had molested his kids unsupervised visits, the mother of the children is still waiting for an apology from the government.
“Nobody has tried to contact me,” says the mother, identified only as J.P.
“My ex still has not been arrested to my knowledge. I want to know whose job it is to arrest him and charge him?”
B.C. ministry failed to protect children sexually abused by father: judge
J.P. and her ex-husband had four children between 2002 and 2008.
In 2009, the father was arrested for assaulting J.P. and their five-year-old daughter and uttering death threats. He then filed for divorce and sole guardianship of the children.
Soon after, the mother told social workers that her three eldest children were reporting that their father had sexually abused them.
“Now I regret that I was teaching them to listen to him knowing what he was making them do.”
The ministry never assessed or investigated the allegations, according to the judgment, and seized the children in late 2009, falsely accusing the woman of being mentally ill.
Despite a court order that required the father to be supervised during visits, social workers allowed him to have unsupervised access in spring 2010.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Paul Walker granted J.P. sole custody of her children in 2012 after finding that the father sexually and physically abused their three eldest children. She filed a lawsuit against the province while the custody hearing was underway.
But it was just last week, six years after the ordeal began, that the provincial government was found responsible in a court of law.
Justice Paul Walker said in a written decision released two weeks ago that the ministry showed “reckless disregard” when it falsely J.P. of being mentally ill when they removed her children from her care.
WATCH: J.P.’s lawyer, Jack Hittrich, spoke with Global News about the victorious civil suit against the province and the Ministry of Children and Family Development
J.P. says she feels some measure of vindication, and hopes this will inspire other parents who have had children taken by the Ministry of Children and Family Development to speak out.
“And I hope more lawyers will take on these kinds of cases, too, because it took me a year and a half to find my lawyer,” she added.
“What I saw and experienced is that so many people within our society and communities are afraid of the Ministry…People are afraid to stand up to them, and I’m just so proud of my lawyer for taking on this job,” she said.
“There’s something not working. There’s something missing. I’d like to learn who has the power and the authority and the will to truly protect kids, that can actually do something about this. There’s obviously something missing from our system.”
The government has appointed Bob Plecas, a former civil servant, to lead an independent review into the case.
But J.P. says she hasn’t heard from Plecas, and doesn’t have confidence in the government.
“It’s just another tangent that they’re going on to distract people from the issues,” she says.
“The kids and I have had enough, and so have all the other people who have gone or are maybe going through a similar type of treatment. It’s time for this to stop.”
WATCH: Call for changes to the ministry are growing
– With files from The Canadian Press
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