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June 11, 2006
Drivel
The headline on Rosie DiManno's piece in yesterday's Star was "We all failed Jeffrey," Jeffrey Baldwin being the five-year-old boy starved, beaten, and forced to live and die in his own filth by his ghoulish, prison-bound grandparents. "For this," writes DiManno:
we should all stand before Jeffrey's mortal remains — last known location, a cremation urn in the possession of a biological father who must have had better things to do yesterday than attend court — and say: "I'm sorry.''
Not likely. I didn't ask Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman to treat their grandson like a psychopath might treat a dog, and I didn't ask the Catholic Children's Aid Society to turn Jeffrey Baldwin's file into an orgy of inexplicable, callous incompetence if not willful aggression. We all recoil in horror at stories like this, but it's not introspection that's required. It's anger — anger at governments and their agencies that couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
Jeffrey's home might as well have had a sign on it reading "ABUSED CHILDREN LIVE HERE." If the CCAS couldn't manage to rescue a nearly six-year-old boy who weighed 22 pounds when he died, it's tough to hold out much hope for children suffering less drop-dead obvious forms of abuse.
Posted by Chris Selley at June 11, 2006 05:43 PM
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