1999 Annual Meeting Presentation

The George Hull Centre Annual General Meeting
June 10, 1999

Guest Speaker: Jeffery Wilson

Lex Clockwork Orange Y2K: Beyond Children’s Rights

Joseph Campbell speaks about how a particular hero in a popular movie may capture the community’s spirit – the essence of its consciousness – as the audience marvels at the transformation of the leading character’s quest for some form of the Holy Grail. Campbell influenced George Lucas and a previous generation was swayed by Luke Skywalker as he struggled with the love and fear of the Dark Side, his father, Darth Vader. It was a well-known plot – the hero who departs, who journeys away in order to journey within and in doing so, transforms, and with the event of his transformation, adds to the vitality, if not the survival of his community. So he is rightfully a Jedi Knight, a hero of a thousand faces that has paid tribute to his spiritual adviser, Obi One.

Thanks to George Lucas, the spirit of today’s community is again captured in the latest tales of Skywalker. In the prequel, the audience learns that the Buddah-like Yoda, who we later find in the sanctuary of the swamps, warned the knights of the round table, the Jedi council, against the induction into its apprenticeship program of one other likely hero, said to be “the chosen one”, a young child of uncanny spiritual force and connection. Against the urging of those who discovered the child with wonderment and awe, Yoda warns, “there is something about this boy, his fear…”or words to that effect. We in the audience know that Yoda’s tuition is right, that he has prophesized the coming of destruction, the Dark Side of the force. We in the audience learn that Darth Vader’s dark side was seeded in his childhood in the form of young Anakin Skywalker. And so, the lesson is that there is good reason to be afraid of the child.

Exactly; we have a community where the spirit, the consciousness of the day, is to be afraid of the child. I want to talk to you about this fear. I want to demonstrate to you that the law – in its present form – is leading us into a collision that makes Stanley Kubrick’s production of Clockwork Orange a reality. I want to implore you to appreciate that the law in its present form maintains a self-destructive polarity of big and small, adult and child, those in control and those said to be biologically dependent as an excuse for their status as being under control, and that this containment where big and powerful rules the day, is going to end us as a specie, much like the dinosaurs who couldn’t get a handle on their size and force. We need to inject into the law a new wisdom that perhaps, knows of oracles for wisdom other than judges and gives us priests other than lawyers, to which we can turn to for spiritual release, comfort and focus on the hero dimension within all of us, but especially our children. There is desperately a need for a new layer to the law. The current metaphor of rights and responsibilities is not working. All of us, but especially our young, because they intuitively know the law is all a charade, are waiting for some new myth that is the vehicle for welcoming the hero back into our community in a way no less than the abundance of heroism that welcomes into the world the new-born baby who has made the first of what should be a number of successful journeys.

Let’s consider some issues of the day to assess the validity of my observations.

There are three children who live in Canada. Two were born here. One was not. The one who was not is the oldest, a 15 year old boy. He was languishing in his land of birth because his audiological problems could not be diagnosed for what they were. Neither the equipment nor expertise existed to provide for the best diagnosis Canada has to offer. In Canada, he is now a star, a vital adolescent taking on the challenges of his environment. These three children know no father but they are blessed with a lone-parent mother who has defied all authority to see that her children are protected and not returned to her homeland where she knows they will suffer, especially the younger two girls. The mother is in Canada illegally. She overstayed a visitor’s visa by some 10 years. Immigration never got around to finding out, when they issued her deportation notice, that she had children. Immigration never considered that the children may have interests independent of their mother, or that the mother has been a most successful parent within her community. Instead, the legal poobahs that govern Canada’s immigration policy deemed she and the non-Canadian adolescent un-welcomed “aliens”, to use their language, and told the mother to leave the country and to take all of her children with her. She went into hiding before she was arrested. She and her children join the many, many others within our community who are homeless. No way to work legally…no way to receive health insurance…a day to day existence with the children perhaps being able to attend school, depending upon the morality of their local educators. All of this is in place as I have the luxury of speaking here tonight in the open in a free and democratic society, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of harm to the children if mother is separated from them or mother and children are forced to leave Canada to return to a place in respect of which mother has no connection other than fear and trauma. Our Federal Court of Canada has said that this story invites no consideration of Charter interests, no connection to liberty and the security of the person, and the fact that Canada ratified a Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991 that enunciates the rights of the three children in such a situation, means nothing.

Now what are to make of us this? Where is the spirit of the community? What myth, consciousness do we draw upon to banish from within us this hero, a mother who is successfully raising her children? What do we say to the adolescent who has overcome a disability within him to find that there exists one around him that is even more difficult to diagnose? How did we come up with a work like ‘alien’? Should we send the judges of the Federal Court of Canada into outer space so that they can view the world as a relatively small sample of particles within the galaxy where, contrary to their legal fiction, there are no boundaries based upon nationhood?

Do you know – I think most of you do – we have a section of our Criminal Code, s. 43 that reads:

Every school teacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child, as the case may be, who is under care, if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances.

In 1978, in Canada, three female children under the age of 13 years found out that this section permitted “stern physical discipline”, to use the judge’s language, in the form of striking their buttocks and legs with a belt, spoon and hands. They had been described as rebellious, and hence the deserving correction by force. In 1992, closer to home within Ontario, an 11 year old female lied about why her room was untidy. She was struck 10 times on clothed buttocks by her mom, causing her contusions and swelling. Her mother pleaded guilty. She received an absolute discharge with the judge observing, “Parents are entitled to use a belt…far be it from this court to say when a parent can and cannot use a belt, there are welts but I guess you expect to find welts when you use a belt.” Four boys, ages 16 to 18, considered to be rude and disrespectful, received karate chops to the shoulder, arm and face from their teacher. This was in 1996 considered to be instilling respect, even, as the court noted, if it involves fear, and therefore it is acceptable, as was the shop teacher in 1993 in British Columbia who used a hammer to cause pain and a possible small lump on the head of the child, who was hit with this instrument of correction for talking in class.

How do we as giving animals, ordained with a conscience reconcile the notion that “zero tolerance” exists for violence committed by those under our control, but 99% tolerance exists for those in control? How does the young person engage the world so that she can be the hero who departs, journeys to learn and acquire and return, when the world is so lacking in comprehension, when its rules are so contradictory and confusing? What happens when there is no worthwhile journey to be taken outward? We know this too. We instinctually must journey and if I can not engage in the outer world, then I will go into the inner world, and with that, comes the repression, anger, and self-destruction and suicide that so characterizes contemporary youth. I spoke about this problem twenty-one years ago at a lecture in Toronto sponsored by Huntley Youth Services. I am saying the same thing. The only difference that I can observe is that I am receiving an Award of Justice for speaking and advocating about these contradictions. It is momentarily flattering, but hardly consoling of the unanswered dilemma, and, in the end, actually enraging. Why wouldn’t it be? I am a false hero. There have been no victories, no changes.

On September 7, 1996, in a cell no larger than an elevator and not nearly as comfortable, a skinny awkward young man was found dying in a pool of mucous and blood. He had been beaten to death by his companion, another young offender. Immediately after they had been locked together in an adult segregation cell, each had been asked to be removed because they feared what would happen. Six months earlier, on February 29, 1996, guards had incited young people to riot at the Bluewater Youth Corrections facility in Goderich, Ontario. The report filed with the government by the Chief Child Advocate of Ontario, Judy Finlay, alleged that the inmates had access to kerosene and matches made available to them by their caretakers. The young residents, one of whom was murdered on September 7, 1996, were sent off to other institutions. Those who went to Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre in London were physically beaten up and brutalized, a fact confirmed by the Advocate. Even back then on March 1st, 1996, when the youth were in the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, the deceased was begging to be isolated from others because he was afraid of what could happen to him. On November 2, 1998, Dr. Karen Acheson, Regional Coroner, began to preside over an inquest mandated to investigate the causes of the inmate’s death and enable five jurors to make recommendations directed to the avoidance of death in similar circumstances. Some seventy-five witnesses were summonsed, including Ontario’s Chief Child Advocate, Judy Finlay. On the opening day of the inquest, all persons who could establish that they had a substantial and direct interest in the investigation of the causes of death or in the prevention of future deaths in similar circumstances were granted standing at the inquest. All of the persons who had standing, with the exception of the one who committed the fatal assault, represented various institutional interests that were associated with the remarkable event that occurred; namely two young offenders with serious mental health problems had been placed together in an adult segregation cell and one had died as a result. It is an event as tragic, but no less remarkable than the riot incited by guards or the subsequent assaults and beatings by other guards. The decreased was an unwilling participant in all of those events. In fact, his presence in the cell was in consequence of a charge of public mischief arising from the riot. He was in transit to a court appearance. “Public mischief”, by all accounts, amounted to wearing a mask and carrying around an oxygen tank. A group of young offenders who were at Bluewater, and knew the decreased, came forward and said they also knew quite a bit about the circumstances that led to his death. I know they knew. I represent them. I met with them and the deceased soon after the riot. They knew about the conditions behind locked doors and the rituals and codes of conduct governing inmate society. What they knew, they said, the guards knew as well. They wanted to have party status so that they could tell it like it was and the jurors could hear their point of view. Some of them, still incarcerated, faced the risk of retaliation from the guards by speaking out. That was a matter of grave concern to the Child Advocacy Office. Yet, here were some heros in our midst, Jedi Knights, coming forward from the Dark Side, to engage the world for the benefit of others. The Chief Child Advocate, Judy Finlay, thought they should be heard. Here is what she said in her deposition before the Chief Coroner and then the court:

The young person is the client, the consumer. A process that is intended to
examine how one of these clients died needs to offer other clients unqualified > standing in this examination. In fact, if this does not occur, I am concerned that the process of this inquest would replicate the aspects of the system it is investigating insofar as incarcerated young persons within the system have no voice, and are entirely dependent upon service providers and caregivers...