The recent "Truth and Reconciliation" report about the horrible things that happened in Canada's residential schools for aboriginals outlines some things we all wish had not happened, including sexual and other abuses.See, for example, this report in HuffPress (via Jack).
Estimated number of residential schools student deaths: over 6,000 ...
Odds of a student dying over the life of the program: 1 in 25 (if 6,000)
- Odds of dying for Canadians serving in the Second World War: 1 in 26 ...
Odds of a residential school student dying in the early years of the program: 1 in 2 ...
Compensation for sexual or serious sexual assaults:
Claims resolved by the independent assessment process: 31,970
Claims in progress: 5,995
Total compensation paid: $2.8 billion
When he sent this link to me, Jack raised some very interesting questions involving the counterfactual:
- What would have happened to these young people if they had not been placed in residential schools? How many of them would have died or been abused if not removed from the reserves?
- What would have happened to the aboriginal native children placed in (sometimes abusive) foster care if they had not been placed in foster care? How many of them would have died or been abused if not removed from the reserves.
These questions are raised, not to excuse the abusers. Far from it.
Rather they are asked because conditions on reserves were (and are) not always very good. They point out that possibly the young native Canadians placed in foster care or in residential schools were better off than they would have been if they had not been placed there.
I don't know the answers to these questions. But based on sketchy knowledge of what conditions were like for some children on reserves, these are reasonable questions to ask.
Jack added:
Also, NOBODY seems to ask why residential schools were set up in the first place. It was to give some hope for kids who were dealing with outrageous reserve conditions.
The Liberal critic on Face the Nation today put the issue of the many native kids in foster care in the same boat, never once questioning why they ended up in foster care.