I’m avoiding the thing about Trump’s family separation policy as much as possible because it literally makes me want to melt down in a rage the moment I think about it almost at all, and as a Canadian there’s an incredibly limited amount I can do when I have to keep my own precarious mental health functioning
but I just want you to know that a lot of the field of Attachment Theory in psychology began after WWII, when psychologists examined the physical and psychological health of children sent away from their parents for their own “safety”
and what we found about the psychological results of broken child-caregiver attachment has led us to conclude that it is literally MORE HUMANE to leave families intact in refugee camps in warzones, than to separate the children from their parents, even if those children are sent to the best of all possible environments.
Speaking as a fucking psychologist I just want you to know that if you want to fuck someone up FOR FUCKING LIFE, the BEST possible way to do it, is to abruptly separate them from the adults who love and care for them. For maximum fuckery do it before the age of 3, 5 is pretty damn good at fucking them up for life too, but honestly any time before adulthood is pretty effective. You will fuck them up in a way we just DON’T know how to heal yet. You don’t just leave them catastrophically more at risk for mental illness, learning disorders, addictions, abuse, and future trauma, you also put them at much higher risk of things like diabetes, heart attack, and suicide.
and then I thought about what kind of environments those kids ARE being sent into and I need to throw up now
Op do you have any links to papers or anything? Preferably not paywalled?
Honestly the field is so huge and so broad that I have too many sources rather than too few. The harder thing is pointing to a concise, targeted, tailored-to-be-relevant summary. (But if child trauma experts in the US aren’t working on producing one at this very instant, I’ll eat my hat.)
Separation is terrible, institutional care is deadly, and these kids are getting both.
Institutional care kills babies. It damages them developmentally, even if the care is “perfect” functionally (clean children, well fed, medical care given) we’re hearing reports that the adults at the facilities are not allowed to offer comfort and that the children are not allowed to hug each other. If people want more, look at the Romanian Orphanage history. I’m not posting links because it makes me cry to think about it.
One of the more layperson-accessible books on attachment and the results of childhood trauma is The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog. It isn’t perfect, but it’s as easy to read as a novel, and the case studies will stick in your head.
As a Canadian, we can contact Minister Ahmed Hussen and demand that the Safe Third Country agreement be dropped. It’s a bullshit piece of post 9/11 legislation and must go. The numbers are 1 613 995-0777 and 1 416 656-2526.
At the very least we can make sure the immigrants fleeing America have somewhere to go.
Ontario has a new environment minister with a background in gambling, an energy minister who has taken on Indigenous affairs and no one in cabinet whose main job will be tackling immigration.
These are among some of the details of the first cabinet in Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford’s new government.
Ford eliminated or altered some of the ministries of the former Liberal government, reducing the size of cabinet to 21 from 29 and signalling some changed priorities by renaming and merging some responsibilities. One example is the elimination of the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.
The changes signal the initial steps the Ford government is taking to reduce the cost and size of government, as the Tories promised to do in the last election.
Opposition parties were less than enthusiastic about the government’s new look, criticizing the premier for merging Indigenous affairs with energy, mines and northern affairs; adding Francophone affairs to the attorney general’s portfolio; and replacing the Ministry of the Status of Women with “women’s issues” responsibilities in another portfolio.
Rod Phillips was named minister of the environment, conservation and parks. He is the former chair of Postmedia and former president and CEO of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. His new position is also includes a subtle change that removes the words “climate change” from its title.
He merged Indigenous affairs with natural resource extraction. That’s not even tone-deaf; it’s just a forthright declaration of intent.
Together with his multiple campaign contributions from overseas fascists, it’s starting to look like Doug Ford might be a little like Trump in more ways than one.
At Doug Ford’s inauguration as Premier of Ontario today, this guy showed up.
People with signs opposing Doug Ford were told to leave, but security let this islamophobia, racist, classist, anti-environmental piece of scum showed up.
His sign reads:
“Bring Back Carding, License Cyclists, Kill Carbon Taxes, Rescind Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC), Ban Black Lives Matter (BLM), Ban the Qur’an, Ban the Burqa, Privatize Services, Decertify Unions, City Hall Casino”
The Broadbent Institute has revived a petition to revoke the Safe Third Country Agreement with the USA.
Very basically the agreement says that the USA is a safe country for refugees and therefore refugees who land stateside before Canada must apply for entry in the USA first. (And visa versa for refugees arriving in Canada first.) Obviously that is not longer true.
Please sign. Petitions don’t force the government to do anything, but it will give the NDP evidence to present to the Liberals that the Canadian public wants Trudeau to do something to help the people who are being incarcerated.
Contact Minister Hussen and your local MP and tell them to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement.
Minister Ahmed Hussen (Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship) says that they are monitoring the situation to see the impact that it’s having, which is a meaningless excuse for their inaction and lack of condemnation. Justin Trudeau is saying it’s not his job to get political about this issue. We need to let them know that it is unacceptable that Canada has not formally condemned the US’s actions, and that our government can and must take meaningful steps to make Canada a safe refuge for those who are facing persecution in the States. You can read more on the Safe Third Country Agreement here.
“Desperate times at our southern border call for desperate measures on the other side:” That was the very loud message from right-wing leaders in the United States and Europe this week.
Their desperate measures shocked the world. The Trump administration’s policy requiring thousands of infants and children to be seized from their parents and held in detention left leaders and citizens aghast (and its most inhumane elements remain in place). On the other side of the Atlantic, we watched the new Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini order boatloads of migrant families turned back into the sea, following his call last year to deal with immigration with a “mass cleansing, street by street, quarter by quarter.”
Most reasonable people agree that these are not humane ways to deal with what these politicians call a “migration emergency.” But too many people take their word that there actually is some sort of a migration emergency.
To be clear: There is no immigration crisis in 2018. Not in the United States, not in Europe, not in Canada.
Doug Ford, who led the Progressive Conservatives to a resounding majority win in the Ontario election, is vowing to scrap the comprehensive sexual-education curriculum as soon as he can.
“I’ll sit down with our new cabinet and with the minister of education, discuss that with them,” he told reporters the day after his victory. “But I can tell you one thing, we’re repealing it. And I’ll tell you another thing, we keep our promises.”
I think this is really the worst part of Kathleen Wynne helping this asshole win. He’s going to do tons of damage to young people in the LGBT community with his stone age thinking, but she had no problem throwing every last one of them under the bus. I can’t think of a worse example of fuck you got mine, and if she has the nerve to show up to any pride events, she owes every young person there an apology.
Woah woah I didn’t hear about this- in what way exactly did she help him win?
Ontario PC leadership candidate Doug Ford recently accepted endorsements from a pair of controversial pastors with a history of preaching hate.
Charles McVety and Paul Melnichuk, two pastors with a well-documented track record promoting homophobia and anti-Semitism, are singing Ford’s praises as he works to lock-down the support of Ontario’s social conservative fringe.
McVety, president of the Canada Christian College and the far-right Institute for Canadian Values, called on his followers to buy PC memberships and cast votes for Ford – someone he describes as a “faithful man.”
“The leadership will be won by just a few thousand votes,” McVety told his Facebook followers this week. “You and your friends can make a difference as we see our land healed.”
trump lies CONSTANTLY. literally every day he is caught in a lie. the word for him is not honest, it’s unfiltered. at some point we’ll know the difference, right? right?????
No wonder this stupid asshole’s museum was so undervisited that her hometown literally demolished it and put a strip mine in its place.
Rush's tumblr archive 