Quebec's education minister called out a Montreal school Tuesday for its reported practice of locking panicking autistic children into a small and unsafe closet to calm them down.
Jean-Francois Roberge was reacting to a news report from Radio-Canada that revealed a school for autistic children used an ill-suited closet as an isolation room for agitated children.
Roberge said the francophone school, Ecole de l'Etincelle, "tolerated the intolerable."
Quebec "isn't in a underdeveloped country that tolerates putting the health of children in danger," he told reporters.
Premier Francois Legault said the government never received a request from the school for more space. He said he appreciates that schools across Quebec are in need of renovations.
"But there is nothing that justifies putting autistic kids in a closet," he told reporters. "It's shocking. It's unacceptable."
Roberge, a former teacher, said the needs of autistic children who are panicking or agitated need to be taken seriously. They need a spot to calm down that is safe and secure, he said, not a "badly adapted" closet.
The minister said he spoke with the chairwoman of the school board, who told him the situation would be handled within a few days. He said the "error" occurred after the school received more students this school year compared with the last one.
Roberge said the school board has enough resources to properly renovate the isolation room. And he delivered a message to the heads of school boards across the province.
"If there is a dangerous area, don't call the minister to come visit the school in a month. Fix it. OK?" he said. "Find a solution."
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Some things never change -
Some things never change - they just just keep cropping up with different names and disguises.
Decades ago a friend of ours, was rejected by his emotionally overwhelmed mother and placed in an "orphanage" run by Quebec's Catholic church. There he was regularly isolated in a closet. He went to this establishment very young, perhaps 3 or 4 years of age, and allowed to go home only at rare intervals. It was a trauma from which he did not easily recover and which estranged him from his parents and the siblings that were not rejected.
The victims are always the most vulnerable and those who require the least maintenance, in food, in accomodation, in care and handling.
Until shamefully recently children had no rights in law. They are still woefully disadvantaged by the lack of rights and their dependance on the benevolence of adults. Benevolence has never been in adequate supply among humans.
Now we have governments that are dealing with the aftermaths of generations of mistreatment of minors, residential schools, correctional institutions for children, understaffed and under-resourced orphanages, overwhelmed and and inadequately funded child welfare systems, AND worst of all, adults (largely male) legislators who consistently push child welfare to the bottom of their priorities.
Now, we also have those same types of legislators, once again trying to constrain the rights of women to control their own bodies and how those bodies are used and abused by these same men, for the gratificatioin of their masculline "needs". Some of these men would not hesitate to engage in the abuse of children for the same purpose. These are the men who believe that they are the crown of creation and above the rules and silly mores of decency.
Humanity, instead of fixing what is really wrong with the societies we have evolved always chooses the cheapest, nastiest, least effortful, most malevolent "solutions" - ranging from infanticide to war.
Is it posible to re-engineer the human genome to enhance benevolence?
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