Susan Clairmont and her colleague John Rennison are fleeing to safety. It’s April 2003 and Clairmont is covering the case of Maria Figliola, who stands accused of hiring a hitman to kill her husband. According to prosecutors, she wanted her husband gone and she wanted his money so she could continue to buy her boyfriend lavish gifts such as a slick Mercedes-Benz and a steady supply of cocaine. Clairmont is outside Figliola’s home, but a man at the residence is unhappy with the reporter’s presence. He berates her and Rennison with angry threats of violence. He smashes Rennison’s camera and a car window before the pair manages to get away. They drive to the local hospital where a police car waits.

“It was definitely one of the scariest moments of my career,” says Clairmont, who has been a crime reporter and columnist at the Hamilton Spectator for 17 years, covering numerous murders and tragedies. Her crime coverage has taken her across Hamilton, creating what her husband jokingly calls her “murder tour.” When she drives by quiet homes and suburban streets, she talks openly about the cases that led her there.

Murder has always captivated journalists. The notorious Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in the late 1880s, is still infamous today. By the 20th century, stories of American serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer made national headlines. Then, in the early 1990s, Canadians became engrossed in the case of Paul Bernardo and
Karla Homolka.

Today, the widespread success of Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial has tapped into the human attraction to true crime stories. The first season of the series analyzes the minute details of a single case: the murder of teenager Hae Min Lee in 1999. The podcast recounts in 12 episodes Koenig’s year-long research into Adnan Syed’s controversial trials and conviction for Lee’s murder. The former Baltimore Sun reporter draws listeners in by taking them through the events of the investigation into Syed’s case. Often, when listeners form opinions about Syed’s guilt, Koenig presents information that casts doubt and changes minds. She expresses her own confusion with the case and shares her views with the listener. The podcast forces listeners to ponder life behind bars, or worse, life as a wrongly convicted prison inmate. Koenig becomes a character herself, the model of a reporter-turned-detective digging deeply into a case. One of the reasons Serial is successful is that it involves listeners in the story by raising questions, inciting empathy and encouraging opinion. Serial, created by four women—Koenig and her production team—is an example of crime reporting at its best.

Historical stereotypes see the crime beat, like much of journalism, as primarily a man’s game. But in Canada, women have been strong voices in crime reporting for decades. Female reporters have helped redefine crime journalism and they’re responsible for some of this country’s most powerful stories.

***

While some reporters say gender no longer plays a major role in the newsroom, an academic paper published in 2012 by Ann Rauhala, April Lindgren and Sahar Fatima of Ryerson University found otherwise. “Influential beats such as politics and crime remain male-dominated, with women covering a third of those stories,” it states. Their paper cites studies that found women reported only 37 percent of crime stories in 2005, even though crime and politics (two male-dominated beats grouped together in the report) accounted for 50 percent of all news stories.

Still, women are increasingly some of Canada’s leading crime reporters—from Rhiannon Russell at the Whitehorse Star, to April Cunningham at The Telegraph-Journal in Saint John, New Brunswick and Kim Bolan at The Vancouver Sun. Catherine McKercher, a journalism professor emeritus at Carleton University, says it was inevitable for women to become leading voices in crime reporting as more and more women enter newsrooms once overpopulated with male reporters. Chasing criminals, she says, is unpredictable regardless of the reporter’s gender. “It’s a dangerous place for a man to be, too. Why is it more difficult for a reporter just because she’s a woman?”

Clairmont has never questioned her place as a crime reporter. She was always a curious person. On a day when she stayed home sick from grade school, she browsed her mother’s extensive book collection, choosing Truman Capote’s true crime classic In Cold Blood from the shelf. The book contributed to her fascination with crime.

“If I didn’t get into journalism school, I would’ve gone to law school,” she says. Her interest in crime was piqued again when one of her graduate journalism school classes sat in on the
infamous Guy Paul Morin murder and rape trial. In the
courtroom, the case of a man who would be convicted and later exonerated held her attention. She found herself returning to the trial without her classmates.

After completing graduate school, Clairmont began working the crime beat following a gig as a general assignment reporter at The Peterborough Examiner. She was unfazed by danger. While five-months pregnant with her first child, she spent a week covering 9/11 in New York City. “That probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done,” Clairmont admits, but her curiosity makes her someone who cannot stay away from a story.

For some time now, Clairmont has been covering the double murder trial of Mark Staples, who was arrested in 2010 for the murder of his father and sister. His motive, according to the prosecutors, was money. On a day in late October, the modern, chilly room on the sixth floor of the John Sopinka Courthouse in Hamilton, Ontario, is almost devoid of Staples supporters. While the lawyers present evidence and witnesses take the stand, Clairmont listens intently and occasionally stops taking notes on her iPad to grab her smartphone and live-tweet case updates, which her newsroom colleagues later post on Storify. On an hour-long recess, Clairmont retreats to the media office at the courthouse, uploading a quick brief about the morning’s events.

During her lunch breaks throughout the trial, Clairmont frequently sees Staples. But encountering those accused of heinous crimes outside the courtroom does not seem to throw her—Clairmont has covered some of the most grisly crimes in the city. She reconciles gruesome details and ordinary human interaction every day.

When she started at the Examiner, she primarily worked with men and says she sought to mimic their unemotional attitudes and their focus on perpetrators. Now, her coverage focuses on more than just the accused. She’s particularly passionate about the victims, sometimes preferring to write about them rather than the accused. In reporting on the Staples case, she uncovered that his sister, Rhonda Borelli, had a son whom she gave up after the boy’s father died. She tracked him down and wrote an article introducing readers to a sweet 21-year-old named William Swayze, whose biological parents were both dead by the time he was four.

***

On the west coast, Kim Bolan has spent more than 30 years on the job. During that time, she has covered murders, gangs and terrorism in B.C. Crime had always sparked her interest, but her reporting on the bombing of Air India Flight 182 solidified her status as a crime-reporting legend. For three years after the explosion that killed 329 people, she followed three men accused of being involved in the bombing. Years later, she still speaks to families of victims and attends memorial services, writing about them to help the community remember those who were lost. She reported the story despite the assassination of fellow journalist Tara Singh Hayer and the harassment of witnesses, newspaper publishers and reporters. While chasing the story, she travelled to Punjab, India, five times in 20 years, meeting with high-ranking Sikh extremists, along with victims of their violence. She also followed one of the accused men to Pakistan before he was slain in India and tracked down other suspects across the country and in England.

In 1998, Bolan received information that a group she was covering held a meeting to discuss “knocking people off.” Police warned her that she was a target and to exercise caution. In July, while her family was asleep, the sound of a gunshot resonated outside her home. She was awake to hear the shot and a car speeding away. She ran to her bathroom and called 911. Police suspected that people close to the Air India bombers were behind the warning shot. Sikh fundamentalist groups had previously sent her death threats. She investigated terrorist groups in B.C. and was later placed under police protection. The bullet, she says, was meant as both a retaliation and a warning to silence her.

Bolan is gruff and intimidating. She worked with police informant Micheal Plante, who infiltrated the Vancouver chapter of Hells Angels and became a part of the Angels’ drug enterprise. She eventually wrote a six-part series about his time with the gang. The Vancouver Sun exclusive detailed how Plante’s undercover work led to the arrest and conviction of a dozen members and associates of the gang. The investigative series about Plante’s time undercover came largely from Bolan’s experience interviewing him directly, rather than from information provided by the authorities. If she can’t get what she needs from the police, she says, she’ll get it straight from those with firsthand experience.

In the early 2000s, Bolan helped investigate the disappearances of 45 Vancouver-area women, mostly sex workers from the Downtown Eastside. As the list of missing women grew, Bolan and Sun colleague Lindsay Kines kept the story on the front page.

Bolan was on the driveway of Robert Pickton’s Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm the night the police executed their first warrant. Her reportage recognized the tragedy of what she witnessed, but was clear and informative. After speaking to an RCMP constable, she wrote: “The excavation and search for human remains at the [farm] resembles the massive undertaking at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center disaster.” Her writing often shows great empathy. She interviewed Pickton’s sister, Linda, who had pleaded with journalists to leave her and her family alone. After Linda reluctantly agreed to speak publicly, Bolan wrote an article discussing the family’s lives after Robert was charged, mixing facts about the family’s finances with clear sympathy for their emotional trauma.

In both 2011 and 2012, Bolan won the Canadian Association of Journalists prize for Daily Excellence. The Vancouver Sun’s editor-in-chief Harold Munro praised her work: “Kim is the best crime reporter in Canada because of her passion for storytelling and relentless pursuit of the truth. She courageously takes on difficult stories—even in the face of tremendous risk to her personal safety.” More than a decade after Pickton’s arrest, Bolan wrote a follow-up about several missing sex workers in a post-Pickton B.C.

***

A new generation is continuing the crime-reporting tradition in its own way, leaving a mark on a beat that always draws attention. Before Robyn Doolittle became known as the Toronto Star reporter who exposed Rob Ford’s crack use, she got her start working the crime beat and making important connections in the police force.

She wasn’t the only one. Tamara Cherry moved from writing about crime in The Toronto Sun to reporting crime on television for CTV, covering many high-profile cases in and around Toronto. Cherry has occasionally felt uncomfortable—when canvassing high-crime areas, for instance—but she says she’s never found herself in a position that “my mother would worry about.”

At 30, Cherry’s passion for the crime beat is clear. “I once wanted to go work in Detroit because the crime rate was so high and I thought it would be an exciting place to be a crime reporter,” she says. She decided against the move because she read a local newspaper and noticed most murders did not receive much attention. “I’m happy to live in a country where every murder is a big deal, where we haven’t become complacent when it comes to crime even though our numbers are drastically lower than those south of the border.”

Last May, shortly after Dellen Millard was arrested for the murder of Tim Bosma, Cherry revealed that Millard had exchanged 13 phone calls with another missing person, 23-year-old Laura Babcock. Police had access to the phone records, but it was Cherry’s investigative work that connected these two cases.

Journalists who deliver the best crime coverage recognize their duty to uncover a story, write about it and capture the reader’s attention. And more and more, in Canada at least, if the question is “Whodunit?” women are increasingly the ones answering.

Photos by Megan Matsuda

Here is a sneak peek at one story from our Spring 2015 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine.

By Erica Commisso

 

The Ottawa office of Bloomberg News is just minutes away from the Rideau Canal and Parliament buildings, directly down the street from the National War Memorial. Most days, this makes for nothing more than a pleasant view. But on October 22, 2014, Bloomberg employees were some of the first to broadcast updates from the attack on and around Parliament Hill. They provided in-depth coverage of the shooting, all while being surrounded by the mayhem that followed the gunshots.

With 150 bureaus in over 73 countries, Bloomberg produces approximately 5,000 stories every day, syndicating them to over 420 publications, including the National Post and the Toronto Star. It also operates its own website with original material, broadcasts via radio and television and publishes both weekly and monthly magazines. The Canadian team has increased by 50 percent in the last two years, with journalists located in several cities across the country.

By Megan Matsuda

In January 2014, former Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon joined Bloomberg to be editor-at-large of the Canadian news division and continue its expansion. He told the Post that he intends to focus on increasing investigative and explanatory journalism in Canada. The original, attention-grabbing stories may set Bloomberg apart from other business news agencies and help it gain more readers.

In October 2014, Greenspon became the managing editor of the global energy, environment and commodities coverage. This announcement came after he’d co-produced a team-written exposé of conversations between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama about the Keystone XL project. The article was broken up into short, easy-to-read sections, but presented a clear investigative angle and extensive research, while providing the appropriate historical context. Maclean’s political editor Paul Wells called the piece a “compelling” read and a celebration of Greenspon’s arrival at Bloomberg.

There are four pillars of coverage that appeal to the average news reader, according to David Scanlan, the news director for the company’s 30-person Canadian editorial team: celebrity, war and conflict, sports and business. While he notes that Bloomberg reports on all four, the economy and markets of major companies are still the news agency’s primary focus.

But it doesn’t have that beat to itself. Business readers have lots of options, including the Globe’s Report on Business, the Post’s Financial Post and magazines such as Canadian Business. The Star closed its subscription-based business websites in 2013, citing a lack of profits after just a year of operation. The Globe’s Tavia Grant sees business journalism becoming increasingly competitive in Canada, ultimately creating better coverage and more choices for readers. “I like that this competition isn’t just the likes of Bloomberg and financial newspapers—we also have more economics professors who are blogging and adding meaningful insight to the public debate,” she says. “But it also means we can’t, for a moment, be complacent. It’s pressuring us to produce more original content and unique insights, which is also a good thing.” Grant, who has written for the Report on Business (ROB) section since 2005 and worked at Bloomberg from 1997 to 1999, says, “Bloomberg is one of the few organizations that has been in growth mode in the past decade.”

The company’s international reach is certainly an advantage. Chris Waddell, a journalism professor at Carleton University who has worked for the Globe’s ROB and CBC News Television, says Bloomberg has become more than just an American company and its global expansion means it can report on international news in ways its Canadian competitors can’t. Before Greenspon arrived, most Bloomberg stories were short and succinct and Grant sees the move into longform and investigative journalism as another example of the company’s growth.

But it still has a lot of work to do. In a presentation to the Ryerson School of Journalism, Scanlan said, “Our goal is to be the most influential news organization in the world. It’s a lofty goal, and we’re not there yet.” He compared the Bloomberg terminal (which compiles data, news, analytics and more) to the human brain: “We use about 15 percent of Bloomberg’s potential.” The new direction is Greenspon’s attempt to expand the news agency’s brainpower.

 

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Five years ago, Cody Royle and Justin Robertson stood facing each other on opposite sides of an Australian football field. The teams they coached were playing each other. “That was one of the first times we met,” Royle says, smiling.

Today, the Australian transplants are planning the launch of their Canadian online sports publication, Bradman Magazine, in January. “We don’t want to compete with TSN, Sportsnet or the Score,” Royle says. Bradman’s mission is to tell long-form sports stories that focus on the stories of the players, not all of whom are professional. Instead of game recaps and scores, Royle says they want to engage the sports fan who’s interested in both the culture of the sports they love and well-executed journalism.

Robertson currently works as a freelance writer—mostly covering cricket—and Royle holds a job in business and marketing. With their combined skill sets, they hope to appeal to a feature sports market they feel has been left untapped in Toronto.

The name Bradman is inspired by an Australian cricket player, Don Bradman (who bears the surname), though Royle and Robertson have no affiliation with him. Instead, Royle says they were inspired of his practice technique—hitting a ball against a cast iron statue—which Bradman, the player, claimed increased his focus and aim. Royle and Robertson, along with their writers (they’re open for pitches), seek to practice a similar method with their journalism: tight, yet provoking writing that can grab and hold a reader’s attention.

As it stands, both Royle and Robertson will continue to work paying jobs as they develop their magazine, and their writers will remain temporarily unpaid. As they gain attention, sponsorship and funding, Royle says, they hope to expand to a national market and, eventually, an international one.

The duo hope to develop a magazine that tells human-interest sports stories, bringing fans into the intimate worlds of their favourite athletes and the local teams around the Greater Toronto Area—to find out what these athletes do beyond the field or stadium. They do, however, maintain that quality journalism is high on their list of things that cannot be sacrificed, alongside a close-knit atmosphere among colleagues. Their first assignment is a low-key beer meeting to build a sense of companionship among their group of sports writers. They hope that these will be the people who will help two young, Australian New York Giants fans develop an online magazine that connects sports fans with athletes, weaving a compelling enough tale to create a lasting relationship.

Bradman plans to have a soft launch, with some preliminary online content posted on the website, later this month.

“Getting Away with Murder-Of children” and “Missed Clues-Lost Lives” read the headlines in The Toronto Star a few weekends last spring. Inside the paper pictures of doe-eyed children stared up at readers, as if pleading for help. These children had been killed by those who were supposed to nurture them, and failed by the system that was supposed to protect them. Once again, brutal child abuse was on the front page. But many of the complex realities facing the child-protection system were missing from the coverage.

Nancy Andrews, 35, is one of the child-protection workers the reporters interviewed. She works in a field where the lives of society’s most vulnerable children rely on careful thought and decisive action. Andrews is an intake supervisor with the Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto (CASMT). She believes that the children under the supervision of her staff have a story to tell, and that society needs to hear it. That’s why she was willing to be interviewed

At the time, she had been an intake social worker for six years. The Star reporters spent about two days with Nancy, meeting some of her clients and talking with her about the frustrations and dilemmas of the job. Like many others in the child-protection system, she hoped the issue of child abuse and neglect was finally going to get more in-depth coverage than the usual “oh-my-God-someone-killed-a-baby” and “how-could-this-happen!?” stuff.

But when Andrews read TheToronto Star the morning of April 19, 1997, she was shaking with anger and hurt and almost in tears. There, on the front page, beneath the headline “Cry For the Children,” the deck said, “They’re fragile, desperately needy. Yet youngsters under the protection of Ontario’s child-care system are likely to end up even more damaged, a Star investigation shows.” This was the first article in a series called “Cry for the Children”, by reporters Kevin Donovan and Moira Welsh. It helped the Star win a Michener award for meritorious public service in journalism.

“Cry for the Children” covered the children whom the Children’s Aid Society fails in a way that the issue had rarely been covered before. The series ran front page, plus one or two full pages inside, on five Saturdays and Sundays between April 19 and June 21, 1997, and Welsh and Donovan wrote several other articles related to child protection. They provided background on how the children had lived and what professionals had contact with them, and analyzed patterns that appeared in the cases they studied. But their research was limited to children who had died in Ontario over a five-year period, and 200 Crown-wardship cases, drawn randomly from the QuickLaw database.

No other story by Donovan or Welsh has ever generated as many letters and phone calls. An entire page, headlined “Crying for the Children” ran in the Star‘sInsight section on April 26. Readers wrote in demanding abusive parents lose all rights to children, and that the system be made accountable for its errors. They were shocked by the detailed descriptions of the miserable lives these children had led, and were outraged that the CASs were allowing these tragedies to happen right under the noses of child-protection officials.

Those within Ontario’s child-protection system had mixed reactions, however. Mention the series in the hallways of the North York office where Nancy Andrews works and a common response is, “Don’t even get me started.”

“When you’re doing the best that you can within a system that is difficult, and you pick up a paper that basically says that a child is better off not having contact with you or your agency, the only word is devastating,” says Andrews. But others were glad that the issue of child abuse was at least making it onto the front page and into the spotlight. Mary McConville, executive director of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, has some concerns about the way the information was presented, but was “pleased to see that a major paper would devote so much time to the issue, and follow it through.” The downside, McConville felt, was that “there was an attempt to position the Star as uncovering the problem, as if the Children’s Aid Societies weren’t doing anything.”

The public only hears about the work that CASs do when there is a tragic failure. Child-welfare professionals like Andrews realize that there are some serious flaws in Ontario’s child-protection system. They want the public to understand how the system works so that the public can help fix it. But by telling their stories through reporters, they lose control of the message. As a result, only one side of the child-protection storyÛthe bad news-makes the front page.

In the spring of 1996, Moira Welsh had just finished covering the end of the criminal trial of Lisa Olsen and Michael Podniewicz, who were convicted of second-degree murder in the death of their six-month-old daughter, Sara Nicole. Sara had succumbed to pneumonia after a short life of chronic neglect and abuse.

Welsh had been at the Star since 1991, and had worked as a general-assignment reporter and photographer at several newspapers across the country. She’d never done any long-term investigative projects before, but the Podniewicz trial left her wondering how many other children were living in the same conditions as Sara Podniewicz, and why Children’s Aid wasn’t doing more to protect them.

Kevin Donovan, 35, had recently finished another major project, as editor on the Star‘s award-winning series on spousal abuse. It tracked 133 cases through the court system and uncovered some serious flaws in the way these are prosecuted. Despite the fact that the two reporters had been at the same paper for nearly five years, they had never worked together. In fact, they had never really spoken much at all. Then one afternoon, before a going away get-together for a colleague, Donovan found himself at Welsh’s desk, discussing stories they had recently covered. Later, at the get-together, Donovan recalls Welsh asking: “So what do you think about child abuse?” Both reporters were particularly interested in the subject because Welsh had a one-year-old son and Donovan’s wife was eight months pregnant with their first child.

That question resulted in more than half a year of research. “The Star was really committed to this story, we had a lot of time to work on it,” says Welsh. “They felt really strongly about it. The amount of time and the amount of play that was given to it was excellent and Dave Ellis, our editor, gave us a lot of freedom and respect to go out and do our work.” Donovan and Welsh pored over court transcripts, followed child-protection workers around, worked with coroners, police officers and social workers across the province, and interviewed families involved with the child-protection system in order to piece together the stories behind the deaths of Kasandra Shepherd, Sara Podniewicz, Jennifer Kovalskyj England, Shanay Johnson, Tiffani Coville and many other children who had been killed in Ontario since 1991. They also examined the court transcripts of more than 200 Crown-wardship judgements (cases where the children were still alive) and the results of criminal trials involving child deaths. All of this information was plugged into three separate databases. The stories and statistics that the research produced shocked TheToronto Star‘s readers.

When Welsh and Donovan approached the Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto about the series, the agency was excited that a major newspaper was going to devote so much research time and space to the issue of child abuse and neglect. Staff there hoped that the series might provide a chance for the public to see the range of services CASs provide, from front-line child protection to foster care and supports for young adults who have grown up in the care of the Children’s Aid Society. After some discussion with John McCullough, the manager of communications at the CASMT, and meetings with Bruce Rivers, the executive director, the agency invited Welsh and Donovan to spend time with workers in a range of services, so that they could see for themselves the pressures that child-protection workers deal with and the services that they provide. Donovan and Welsh were also talking to the Catholic Children’s Aid Society and meeting intake and family service workers from different agencies.

It soon became apparent that the CASs and the reporters had very different agendas. Welsh and Donovan didn’t meet with workers from foster care and other areas of the CASMT, because they were primarily interested in children who had died while under the protection of a CAS and with living children the system had failed to protect.

“A newborn baby is found in the trash, and suddenly there are hundreds of calls from reporters, we hold a news conference, it’s in the headlines, and then the media go on to something else,” complains Bruce Rivers. “There are a few journalists who are really committed to the issue, but short-term attention is more typical.” The problem with one-shot coverage is that the public never gets to see the system as a whole. People rarely learn, for example, that CASs in Ontario receive $420 million in funding, with which they must provide services for about 107,000 families, including 150,000 children, about 21,000 of whom are being cared for outside of their homes. The public almost never hears that typical caseloads at the intake and family service levels are between 20 to 40 families per worker, or that each case involves all the children in the family, and includes phone calls and visits to the family, as well as doctors, teachers, day-care staff, other relatives, and anyone else who can provide information on a child’s well-being. All of these factors affect a worker’s ability to protect a child, but if the public never hears about these issues, external pressure on the government to make children a priority is badly weakened.

In fact, child abuse makes it into the headlines so rarely that headline writers don’t know the terminology involved in child protection. The effects can be disastrous. On March 25, 1997, just before the series ran, an article by Donovan and Welsh carried the headline “Children’s Death Rate ‘High’ in Care.” The term “in care” actually means that a child has been removed from the family home and is being cared for by the Children’s Aid Society. Donovan and Welsh’s story was actually about the high number of children who had died even though their families were involved with a CAS. Donovan and Welsh didn’t use the term anywhere in the story, but nonetheless, the headline writer’s mistake was costly for many child protection workers. Nancy Andrews had just brought a child into foster care the night before that headline appeared, and the next day the child’s mother called, crying, convinced that her child would be killed in foster care. After the series, Andrews said, “I had many people say to me: ÎI know what you guys are all about nowÛI read the papers. You guys don’t know what you are doing.’ That happened numerous times, from clients I was trying to work with. So their trust level went down, and so did our ability to work with them.”

Many social workers were getting the same reaction. One worker was trying to bring a teenager into care and the teenager asked her: “Are you going to kill me? Social workers kill kids.” Another worker was taking some children into court to ask that they remain in care, when a lawyer said to her that the children would be safer with their mother than with the CAS.

Social workers need the trust of the families they are working with, so they can help them find solutions to their problems with drug abuse, stress due to poor housing and economic situations, or a variety of other issues.

Deaths and Crown-wardship cases are only a fraction of the child-welfare story. The Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, published in 1994 by Nicolas Trocme of the Centre for Applied Social Research at the University of Toronto, found that applications to child-welfare court were made in less than 10 percent of cases, and less than 0.3 percent of cases ended up going to trial. By contrast, Welsh and Donovan’s database of living children included only those whose cases went to trial. And while any deaths are too many, the system as a whole was judged on a small percentage of the cases it handles. “There is merit in looking at such cases, but if the public ends up perceiving that the majority of typical cases is as serious as the cases that have led to a death or to a trial, then there is a risk that the public will put pressure on the Children’s Aid Societies to move toward a more interventionist approach.” says Trocme.

One of Nancy Andrews’s former clients was willing to be interviewed by Welsh and Donovan. She had a terrible childhood, and had been introduced to drugs by her parents. She became a drug addict by the time when she was around 12, and ended up addicted to crack and heroin. But when she found out she was pregnant, she tried to get clean for the first time in her life. She entered a series of drug rehabilitation programs, but had two relapses. When her baby was born, he tested positive for cocaine, so Andrews went to the hospital and brought the baby into care. The mother was devastated but decided to work with Children’s Aid to get her baby back. She went into a rehabilitation program, found 24-hour supportive housing where she and the baby could live, and travelled across the city every day to a visitation centre in Scarborough to learn parenting skills and to be with her baby. She submitted to random drug screenings and after about four months the baby was allowed to go home with her on the condition that Children’s Aid would continue to monitor them.

Shortly before the baby was to be returned to his mother, Welsh and Donovan interviewed her. At one point during the interview, she looked down at her son and said: “You know, if I started using again, I’d call Children’s Aid myself. How could I hurt him?” After about an hour and a half there were tears in everyone’s eyes. But Welsh and Donovan decided not to use this woman’s story in the series because they wanted people who would go on the record, so they could put names and faces to the people they wrote about, and this woman did not want her real name used.

When asked why the series had such detail on the tragedies, but only mentioned one “success story,” Donovan says, “We did it this way because it was all we could do. I would love it if the Children’s Aid Society would let me go in and look at all of their files. I believe it would be a lot worse than what we wrote. I think there is altogether too much confidentiality in the Children’s Aid in this province, and that’s one of their big problems.”

There is a difficulty balancing the public’s need to know how the child-protection system works, and consideration for the privacy of the CASs clients. Welsh and Donovan followed Andrews around for a few days, but they couldn’t follow her inside clients’ homes, since many of her visits are unannounced. When intake workers are first investigating a family, they often arrive on the doorstep without warning so that they can see the home as it really is, not how the family wants to present it to the CAS. Put yourself in the place of parents who open the door and find out that they are being investigated by the Children’s Aid Society and may lose their children. Imagine finding out that a major newspaper wants to come inside as well.

Ontario’s child-protection system has been put under the microscope recently. It is faced with a decision: open up to journalists and hope that the stories they produce will raise public awareness of child abuse and neglect, and the difficulties the child-welfare system is facing; or retreat from the past wounds the media have inflicted and allow the fate of thousands of desperately vulnerable children to fade out of the public’s and the politicians’ view. “I’ve spent an enormous amount of time talking to our workers, reminding them that we mustn’t let the overriding negativity of some of the coverage [including the Star‘s] prevent them from wanting to spend time with the media,” Bruce Rivers says.

On June 21, 1997, the last article in the series, headlined “How to Save the Children,” appeared on the front page of the Star. It advocated a seven-step plan to fix Ontario’s child-welfare system. None of the suggestions were new to child-welfare professionals. They had been saying the same things for years, but their reports and complaints had been ignored. Donovan and Welsh openly admit that all of the suggestions they printed were made by people within the system long before they appeared under their joint bylines. In fact, the Star‘s recommendations are almost identical to the recommendations of the final report of the Child Mortality Task Force.

The Child Mortality Task Force was formed in April of 1996, because the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies and the chief coroner’s office realized that they really didn’t have any information or statistics on child mortality in Ontario. Each of Ontario’s 55 CASs is required to report any “serious occurrences,” including child deaths, but no records of these reports have been kept or statistics gathered. Welsh and Donovan say that the task force wasn’t really doing anything until they approached deputy chief coroner Jim Cairns late in July with a list of questions about child mortality. They didn’t hear anything until mid-September, when the task force held a press conference to announce that it was going to look at child mortality in terms of a list of questions, that to Donovan and Welsh, seemed very similar to their own list. There is a great deal of bitterness over who started what, but both the task force and the reporters agree that making sure the recommendations are put in place is more important than fighting over who started the process.

One of the recommendations made by both parties has been put in place. The Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies has adopted a risk-assessment tool to be used by all of the 55 Children’s Aid Societies in the province. Another recommendation, that there be a province-wide database so that CASs can share information on parents who may move from one area to another, is being studied by the Ministry of Community and Social Services. The ministry has also announced that it is conducting its own review of the child-protection system. Mary McConville worries, however, that if the pressure is not kept up, the recommendations will not become legislation before the current provincial government’s mandate is over. “These are complex projects, and we can’t afford to let them slide off because some new political priority has come to the government’s attention,” she says.

Unlike other vulnerable groups in society, abused and neglected children do not have a voice. They can’t vote, they can’t lobby the government and they don’t have any consumer clout. They need journalists to tell their stories. It is difficult to hear these stories without wanting someone to pay or to exact revenge for the loss of an innocent life. But we need to consider carefully the best interests of the children still living in the child-protection system before we call for sweeping changes based on the stories of the dead. As I leave Nancy Andrews’s office, we are still discussing the role of journalists, and she says, “I don’t think they realize how much power they have. I really don’t.”