Representative for Children and Youth (RCY) Report – Missing

Last updated on December 16, 2024

The Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) is committed to sharing with British Columbians the actions taken in response to recommendations provided by its oversight bodies, including the Representative for Children and Youth (RCY).

Missing: Why are children disappearing from B.C.’s child welfare system?

The safety and well-being of children and youth is the ministry’s primary focus. When a child or youth is missing, the immediate priority is to connect with and locate the child. Staff at the local office immediately inform senior local management as well as the office of the Provincial Director of Child Welfare to ensure the local office receives any additional support that is required.

The ministry is appreciative of reports like this which continue to help us work cooperatively with the RCY towards a common goal of improved safety for children and youth.

The Representative for Children and Youth (RCY) released the report Missing in April 2023. This report summarizes the RCY’s findings about children and youth who are missing from care. The report examines why children and youth are “running from” or “hiding from” the care system, and the conditions that lead to children being lost while in care. The report contains nine recommendations directed to the Provincial Director of Child Welfare in collaboration with the Indigenous Child and Family Service Agency Directors.

The initial eight recommendations focus on:

improving the quality and consistency of the ministry’s information collection and reporting relating to children and youth in care who are missing.
policy and practice changes to ensure an equitable and robust response in all cases of a child or youth going missing.
improvements to working with children and youth to determine why they are going missing and what can be done to prevent this.
developing resources and training to support staff in the use of child-centred, person-first and identity-first, destigmatizing language.

The last recommendation is a reiteration of a recommendation from the report Skye’s Legacy: A Focus on Belonging (Skye’s Legacy). The recommendation calls for a systemic needs analysis of cultural and family support resources required to ensure that social workers are better supported to promote a sense of belonging and identity for First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Urban Indigenous children and youth in care.

The RCY’s timeline for implementation of six of the recommendations was November 2023. Two recommendations are to be implemented by September 2024 and the RCY considers the implementation of the recommendation repeated from Skye’s Legacy to be overdue.

The ministry accepts the intent of the report’s recommendations and has provided the RCY with three updates, in October and November 2023 and in May 2024 on the progress towards implementation.

Ministry response

The ministry has taken the following steps in response to this report:

Monitoring

Provincial Director of Child Welfare staff monitor all children and youth in care who are missing and provide practice support to local service delivery and Indigenous Child and Family Service (ICFS) agency staff as needed until missing children and youth have returned or are known to be residing safely elsewhere and their absence and related concerns have been discussed with them.
As part of the monitoring of missing children and youth, at the provincial level staff identify children and youth in care who are described as missing in reports of critical injuries and ensure that efforts are underway to connect and locate these children and youth. This ensures that children who are critically injured while also considered missing are monitored to ensure their missing status at the time of the critical injury is also tracked and resolved.

Policy and Practice – Connecting with Children and Youth

Operational policies regarding missing children and youth have been updated to clarify definitions as well as roles and responsibilities of the child or youth’s care team in the immediate response, including reporting to police.
The need for there to be additional safety concerns before a child is reported lost or missing has been removed from policy.
The need for a child to be “habitually” missing before workers are directed to work with the child or youth to determine why they went missing has been removed from policy.
Interim practice guidelines have been developed in collaboration with ICFS agencies and with input from the ministry’s Youth Advisory Council. These guidelines have been implemented to clarify the roles and responsibilities of ministry and ICFS agency workers and care teams at the time a child or youth goes missing and after. The interim practice guidelines also focus on meaningful engagement with children and youth. This includes exploring with the child or youth why they left, what happened while they were away, if medical care was required, and what could be done to prevent them from needing to leave again.
To complement the practice guidelines, “tip sheets” were developed for workers and caregivers to provide practical strategies to increase belonging, strengthen relationships and prevent instances where children/youth go missing.
Provincial orientations to the policy and interim practice guidelines for MCFD and ICFS agency staff are ongoing.
MCFD undertook a comprehensive engagement process to review operational policies and practice guidelines published in November 2023. Requests for engagements were sent out to ICFS agencies and to Indigenous partners, which led to nine informative engagement sessions. This information will be incorporated into further updates where needed.

Training and Resources

Existing resources and guidelines for staff to reinforce the use of child-centered, person-first, identity first, and destigmatizing language when speaking to and documenting the lives of children, youth, families, and communities have been organized and posted on the ministry’s intranet platform for internal ministry staff and ICFS agencies.
The Provincial Director of Child Welfare’s Youth Advisory Council is providing input to ensure the language in learning materials contributes to the creation of a sense of belonging.
A learning site that hosts existing and new resources promoting the adoption of destigmatizing language in documentation about children, youth and families has been launched.

*The response to the recommendation copied from Skye’s Legacy will be tracked through that report.

Representative for Children and Youth (RCY) Report: Missing - Why are children disappearing from B.C.’s child welfare system?

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