Rising numbers of runaways in youth centres: staff denounce a “broken system”

Tired of being singled out, worn down by a system they consider to be failing, frustrated at not having the means to carry out their youth protection mission, a social worker, a youth centre teacher and a DPJ employee speak out. After Shayna's testimony and the rise of the #SurvivantedeCentreJeunesse keyword, they in turn denounce the issues of these establishments, which the Director of Youth Protection, Lesley Hill, also acknowledges.

For almost a year, the Centre jeunesse de Laval has been experiencing one runaway after another. According to the CISSS concerned, 298 young people have run away in the last 10 months. This is the highest number since 2020. This increase can also be seen in the rest of Quebec, but with a difference. “There has been an even greater increase in runaways among girls than boys in recent years,” notes Lesley Hill, the National Director of the Direction de la protection jeunesse (DPJ, youth protection services).

Neither reports nor the Laurent Commission seem to have been enough to stem the tide. While the reasons for running away are multi-factorial, the living conditions in youth centres drive some to run away, as several young women who have passed through the Centre jeunesse de Laval told us in the first part of our investigation. They are not alone in speaking out. Despite the ban on communicating with the media, youth protection professionals are sharing their stories. Like the young people, they are calling for awareness and rapid change. 

Youth centre: “It really is the last resort”

La Converse spoke to an employee of the Direction de la protection de la jeunesse (DPJ), who will be referred to as Florence to preserve her anonymity. 

Like many Internet users, she discovered Shayna through the video the young girl posted on TikTok on February 7. “It made me really sad, but I was really happy it was out there.” She salutes the teenager's courage in speaking out on camera to denounce what she's experiencing at the Centre jeunesse de Laval. “She has the right to express herself! I think young people need to talk about what they're going through inside the system, and that a social worker who does their job well shouldn't worry about it,” she adds.

Florence knows the “system” from the inside, as she is one of those who must manage the reports made to the DPJ and decide on the fate of these young people. In fact, she always tries to avoid placing young people in youth centres. 

In her opinion, some of the children placed in these facilities don't belong there. These centres house teenagers who have committed crimes; children who are victims of parental neglect or physical or sexual abuse; and children who no longer have parents to care for them. 

“If you're placed in a centre at 15 because you're being abused by your father and your mother doesn't believe you, you need to be taken care of! Imagine the anger that creates, feeling alone at that moment, seeing caregivers who don't help... You can't feel like you're there to be taken care of if your room looks like a prison cell!” laments Florence. According to the DPJ employee, the coercive culture of youth centres sends the wrong message to the young people placed there. “These young people get the idea that we want to punish them by putting them there and, honestly, I'm not going to argue that it looks like a big punishment too!” confides Florence, exasperated.

That's what happened to Laurie*, now 27. As a teenager, Laurie was placed in a youth centre after running away from home following the death of her mother. In her unit, she discovered almost prison-like rules. She was not allowed to speak with other young people without the presence of a social worker. “I had just lost my mother and I had no support for that, no follow-up, no care.” She claims to have witnessed acts of mistreatment by employees at the centre. “I remember one girl who didn't want to be taken to the isolation room. Then there were very loud cries of pain, and when I saw her come back several hours later, she had bruises on her arms,” asserts Laurie. Despite repeated requests for placement in another institution, Laurie remained in the youth centre for four long years. She left when she came of age. “I spent four years there, and nothing was done for me,” she said.

Neglected girls

Florence, for her part, doesn't mince words when she talks about the lack of attention paid to residents of youth centres in Quebec: “Don't we give a damn about young people? We really don't! People don't care!” she exclaims. 

“Sexual exploitation is invisible, whereas a guy who shoots another guy in the street, we're going to see it and hear about it! A dead body is concrete, but sexual exploitation takes place in silence...” she continues. “You have to understand that these are teenage girls in distress, and the perfect guy comes along and offers them everything they want... Some of them get on board. Sometimes they're found; sometimes it's a vicious circle: they run away again, and so on... Others flee to the other end of Canada, where they're never found, and end up turning 18, making a living in drugs or becoming sex workers.” 

With no role models or healthy emotional patterns in their environment, these young girls lack the guidance they need to build themselves up. “Most of them would like to become architects or lawyers, but everything around them is already too destroyed for them to develop enough self-confidence and self-esteem,” testifies the worker. “The system contributes to this, with caregivers changing all the time and your parents not being able to take care of you. So, you're stuck there with young people who are always in crisis because you're not able to calm yourself down, you fall into a kind of vicious circle, you go crazy...”

These girls need special supervision, but it's not always available. “A junior social worker is just a free pass for them to run away, or to react harder because they feel misunderstood,” explains the DPJ professional. “There's something extremely frustrating about talking about your situation with someone who looks at you with fish eyes. These young people need very experienced counsellors.”

Florence asserts that the problem with youth centres is systemic, and starts with staff recruitment. First and foremost, the selection criteria are not high enough. “We need more extensive skills tests and interviews to ensure that we have employees who are capable of taking care of young people.”

In a context of skilled labour shortages, the psycho-social support Florence calls for is rarely a reality. “It's not an environment where social workers have time for gentle intervention, even if the children need it,” she explains. “It's a broken system.” 

She tells us about her difficult start at the DPJ, which required her to adapt quickly to the particular workings of this institution. “When I started working at the DPJ, I often had trouble with the things I heard, the things my colleagues said. They weren't aware of their biases and what they were going to inflict on families because of their lack of education,” confides Florence. And she's adamant that the system needs to change. “I'd like to see this shaken up and the government no longer have a choice but to act to require extensive skills testing and interviews to ensure we have employees capable of caring for young people.” 

When asked what better youth centres might look like, Florence closes her eyes and describes a friendly gathering place: “It should be a big house, it shouldn't look like a prison. It should be like a mansion, a living environment. Even if the [furniture] is fixed to the floor, there's a way to make it beautiful, to personalize the place.” 

Low wages, lack of resources, violence — unattractive youth centre jobs

One youth centre employee, whom we'll call Hélène*, agreed to talk to us about her working conditions, despite fears of the repercussions on her career. At the age of 14, Hélène was also placed in a youth centre. She remembers being put in isolation and confined to her room for several days at a time. Some of the consequences were more severe. “I spent four months without being able to leave the building. It was a prison, and kids have no business there,” she says. According to her, things have changed since the days when she was under state guardianship. “But it also brought a form of structure to my life at a time when I needed it. I had a bad environment, I could have ended up in human trafficking if I hadn't been placed in a centre.”

Hélène decided to return to the centre as an employee to better help the young people who end up there, but she believes that even the most dedicated teachers and social workers can't do their job properly because the workload is so heavy.

“When you're a social worker and you're responsible for 200 cases instead of 60, you can never really be there for the children,” she explains. 

In a context where the most urgent matters must always be dealt with, no gentle social intervention would be possible. “We stop seeing them as people, we focus on the need to deal with them as quickly as possible to move on to the next one,” she admits bitterly. “These young people need love and attention. But, in too many cases, they're treated like numbers.”

Heavy workloads, unattractive salaries, exposure to violence and the impossibility of carrying out their youth protection mission would drive many youth centre workers to give up. Others give it a try before throwing in the towel, unable to cope with the daily grind. Such is the case of Marie*, who worked as a youth centre teacher for years before leaving the sector in 2015. 

She says budget cuts and constant staff turnover put youth as well as the adults entrusted with their care in danger. When she was working at a Montreal-area youth centre in 2013, they cut security staff on her unit from three guards to two. The following day she was punched in the face by one of the students.

Teachers being injured on the job meant more staff turnover and more uncertainty for the children.

“In a five-day week, there were times where, three of those days, the kids were being taught by a (substitute teacher),” Marie said. “They don’t know this person, they don’t trust them, we’re constantly throwing this uncertainty at them at a time when they’re desperate for stability.”

In her time at youth centres, she saw a noticeable drop in the quality of food and an obsession with budget cutting that got so bad, the youth centre lowered the quality of plastic used in the students’ medicine droppers. 

Though she hasn’t worked at a youth centre in a decade, Marie is still in touch with former colleagues who say things have only gotten worse. 

“Our social safety net is crumbling,” she said. “Kids are being pushed to their limit. We take them out of their homes, put them in an area that’s poorly organized and borderline chaotic and it’s obvious to them their wellbeing isn’t a priority. They’re extremely perceptive.”

New National Director of the DPJ admits there are systemic problems

Lesley Hill, National Director of the DPJ, who took up her post last fall, is well aware that she has inherited a network mired in difficulties. With a career in social work, having directed several rehabilitation centres and served on the Special Commission on Children's Rights and Youth Protection, she knows the centre and its problems. 

From the outset, Lesley Hill acknowledged the existence of “a lot of testimony and a lot of issues” linked to youth centres, as well as an increase in the number of runaway girls in recent years. The national director of the DPJ assures us that she intends to change things radically. “No young person should have to spend their adolescence in a rehabilitation centre. Just the word 'rehabilitation' means: it's temporary, you go there, you're ‘rehabilitated’ in quotation marks, and you leave,” she says.

The director points out that “control measures should be exceptional, not regular” and that they are “governed by the law.” The use of these measures is in fact regulated. Section 118.1 of the Youth Protection Act states that: “Force, isolation, any mechanical means or any chemical substance may be used as a measure to control a person in a facility maintained by an institution only to prevent him from inflicting injury on himself or others. The use of such a measure must be minimal and exceptional, and must take into account the person's physical and mental state.”

Yet several testimonies describe solitary confinement for many hours — 12 hours in the case of our source Shayna — for reasons that have more to do with punishment than safety. “I'm absolutely opposed to this type of practice (...) One hour is the maximum desired, or tolerated, for a teenager (...) It's unacceptable to me. If there are young girls out there who are still saying things like that, they need to lodge a complaint, or else I'll ask my colleague, who's already there in Laval, to meet them there,” Lesley Hill says.

“It's not right. After a runaway, when a young person comes back to the centre, she should be welcomed properly: see if she's cold, give her soup, something to eat, ask her why she ran away, what happened to her, etc. So, what's clear is that it's not an isolation room that it takes! So, what's clear is that it's not an isolation room that it takes!”

According to the DPJ director, repression must be replaced by prevention and reparation in youth centres. “I think people are so busy trying to manage risk that they sometimes fall into methods that are really too controlling. They're stuck with this risk management. But I'd rather see less risk management, even if it means more runaways, and more feedback from the young people,” explains the woman who believes that this approach, while provoking fears in some parents, would enable better long-term support.

An institution paralyzed

Since the wave of runaways in 2016, little seems to have changed, if multiple testimonials from young people and professionals are to be believed. 

Speaking of the Centre jeunesse de Laval, Lesley Hill assures us that things will change. It's just a question of when. “I think Laval's leadership knows that things have to change. They're in action and they're moving for real. But you don't bring about a cultural change by shouting 'scissors'. Culture change doesn't happen quickly,” says Hill. 

“I'm currently working at the Laval centre with a colleague (in December, Manon St-Maurice was appointed as external accompanier-expert; Editor's note) to review the whole way Laval uses what are called control measures: isolation, restraint (...) In Laval, this prison environment, if I had a magic wand, I'd throw it all out, then I'd rebuild something else.... Management has a rebuilding plan, and I think their vision is the right vision.” The project calls for the construction of small units, but is neither endorsed nor financed. It will therefore be many years before the Centre jeunesse de Laval sees these changes.

More generally, the director wants to make some major changes. In youth centres, young people are placed in units: so-called “open” units, where they have the most freedom; “closed” units, with stricter supervision; and “secure” units, also known as “high-dynamic” units, with total control over their actions. For 30 years, these units have been the subject of debate. The Laurent Commission has repeatedly questioned their legality. 

“I'm not saying I'm going to demolish or remove everything tomorrow, but children under the age of 12, eventually, I wouldn't want to see any of them in rehabilitation centres at all,” says Hill. She hopes to create centres that are “much more open to the community”: “Yes, young people run the risk of running away, and they can screw up, but we have to be there to pick them up, support them and accompany them. I really want our network to get back to the core values of our professions, which are much more humanistic.”

In this respect, Hill acknowledges that staff recruitment is one of the areas in need of improvement. “Yes, the responders are young, and yes, there are cases that get out of hand. So, whenever there are cases that get out of hand, I expect us to take stock of the situation within the facility to understand, and to try to improve,” she says without elaborating. 

While noting that many young people talk about the help provided by certain dedicated educators or counsellors, she admits that more background checks and more screening of candidates are needed before any hiring. But is the institution really ready for an in-depth change in its methods?