Childhood of terror in foster care leads to settlement for N.L. woman

A lawsuit focusing on the abuse a woman from Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula suffered while in foster care has finally wrapped up, but her lawyer says no amount of money can erase her client's past.

After a five-year court battle, the woman has received a settlement of more than $500,000 and an acknowledgement from the provincial government that she was mistreated and abused as a child in care.

The woman, who can't be identified because of a publication ban, was born in 1958 and placed in foster care by her mother. St. John's lawyer Lynn Moore said the mother wanted the girl placed for adoption, but that never happened.

Instead, she was put in a foster home in a small community on the Avalon when she was two years old — and since then suffered abuse at the hands of her supposed family and community members alike until she was old enough to leave.

"It was a horrendous tale of abuse. It was physical abuse, it was sexual abuse. She was treated like a second-class citizen by virtue of the fact that she was a foster child," Moore told CBC's On The Go.

Before the woman was five years old, she was sexually assaulted by a man in the community, as well as her foster grandfather. According to Moore, that was just the start.

"The foster parents were big drinkers and the home was a watering hole for many people in the community and they saw how poorly she was treated, they saw her being beaten, and they knew that she was fair game. They could do whatever they wanted to her and nothing was going to happen."

Through the years, the girl was raped by three other men in the community — two of whom were brothers.

"On another occasion the house that she was living in actually burned to the ground and she was required to stay somewhere else, and her foster mother wrote a note to the director of child welfare saying she's staying with friends, and she wasn't staying with friends," said Moore.

"She was staying in a home where she was being raped every night and the department of child welfare, as it was at the time, had a policy in place that they would conduct home visits every six months and they did not do that for seven years, six years. There's no record of any visit at all."

'Holding her own'

Through the 60s and as the woman got older, Moore said she would hurt herself in an effort to get away from the home, including punching a wall to break her own hand.

The government department regulations outlined a necessary visit by a social worker would be made to the home every six months, but Moore said for the first six years the woman was at the foster home, no visits were made at all.

When a worker did finally get around to making a visit it became obvious things weren't right, but nothing was done.

"At one point during the court process, or during the lawsuit, I was questioning the social worker that was responsible for her for part of this period of time and I read that out to him and I said, 'This was written before you got the file. Did you read this?' And he said, 'Well, I read the file,' and I said, 'Does this stand out in your mind?'" said Moore.

"And she [the woman in foster care] became so upset and she left the room and she said, 'They knew?' She always assumed that they didn't know, but there were some 40 different instances that I noted in the files, which were red flags that the department should have followed up on and they didn't.

"There was one where one of the later social workers says, 'Well, it's beyond me why they allowed her to stay here,' but that same social worker didn't get her out."

As a teenager, the woman showed up at school with a black eye prompting the school to make a call to the case social worker.

The worker visited the home and made the decision to remove the foster brother who had punched her, saying the girl could stay because "she appeared to be holding her own," Moore said.

"There she was, a child, a teenage child with a black eye and how they could conclude that she was 'holding her own' is beyond me."

Arranging funeral for foster mother

When she was old enough, the woman left the foster home the way Moore said many young women did at the time — she got married. While that marriage was doomed to end, Moore said, the woman wound up with a job in St. John's.

After some time, she remarried — and remains married to the present day with two children. Moore said the woman is a contributing member of her community with a stable home life and doesn't battle substance abuse, like many people with similar backgrounds.

The case was brought to Moore's attention when the woman's foster mother died. She was left to make the final arrangements and approached Moore when the funeral home tried to collect money for funeral services.

Moore said the woman has modest means and didn't realize she was engaging in an agreement that would involve a hefty bill for the funeral when she discussed it over the phone.

"She came to us and said, 'What am I going to do?' And then the story came out and we told her that this was an option."

They sued as a personal injury claim for a sexual battery, that she was sexually assaulted while in the government's care and the department didn't exercise the care it was required to provide, Moore said.

"The cases say that when the government takes responsibility for a child they have to live up to a standard of care, and the standard is that of a prudent parent solicitous to the needs to the child and we had very little difficulty in convincing the government that they had not met that standard."

Not a stretch to figure it out

Moore said given the small size of the community, it would not have taken much work on the department's behalf to find out just how bad things were and figure out they had a child in need of protection.

"They didn't — they just didn't. They were concerned about finding foster homes for people and she was in a foster home. And there was this one line where they said, 'The foster home is meeting the needs.' Well, it wasn't meeting her needs — it was meeting their needs."

According to Moore, government was prepared to reach a settlement rather than head to court. However, there was a legal process that needed to be followed, which lead to five years in court.

However, Moore said despite the necessary process she isn't happy about the amount of time it took to get the case moved through the courts and has been meeting with department officials to discuss how to best ensure future cases are processed more quickly.

"I'm very hopeful that we're going to be able to come up with a process that will speed things up for future clients and the other ones that we currently have."