Pon, Gosine and Phillips (2011) explored the overrepresentation of racialized persons in welfare services, namely, Indigenous people and Black children in Canada. They argue that this problem is rooted in the post-war mentality of white supremacy that shaped policy and the state’s response to social challenges in the family. Crafting government responses to welfare within a context of coloniality and possession made minority children objects of possession within the national welfare system in Canada. Like Pon, Gosine, & Phillips, Thobani (2007) acknowledged the embedded racism against racialized children, Blacks, and Indigenous people that has affected Canadian welfare institutions. While raising problems with state intrusion into the family system
of minorities, Pon et al. (2011) argue that it is insufficient to adopt anti-oppression approaches to address the inherent racism that plague the Canadian welfare system. They contend that white supremacy and its disruptive effect on child welfare should be countered through anti-colonial and critical feminist perspectives. Decolonizing the welfare state is thus shown to be critical in order to effectively transcend the boundaries of progress and inclusivity. This has important implications for how the welfare system treats Indigenous survivors of IPV. Indigenous women survivors are likely to be attended to in a way that contradicts the normal structure of their society since the system is founded on colonialism and genocidal policies of forced dislocation, removal, and state- sponsored violence.
Heron (2007) also examined identity formation among white women working in African countries. The white sense of identity, a superior self, is itself based on a relationship with non- white identities around the world. This relational identity is grounded in the idea of empire and its colonial legacy of racism, white supremacy and development inequality. The self, the white self, is therefore one that is gained through othering non-white bodies and cultures as invariably different, strange, and even less developed. This way of othering is thus an indirect way of furthering colonial discourses of difference and reinforcing notions of racial superiority, possession, and power. In the process, white women’s desire to continue to uphold colonial structures of inequality impress the need to “help” the “other” through the power and privilege whiteness offers while reinforcing normalized structures of inequality. White superiority thus legitimizes entitlements which, in turn, impels an obligation towards non-white bodies. This theme of coloniality is important because, as Heron (2007) notes, white sense of superiority pervades official development work and invariably the welfare system in Canada. This sense of superiority in the context of this study potentially limits the extent to which Indigenous survivors can be empowered in self determined and autonomous ways to cope with IPV. This also reveals how the
system of welfare is of less benefit to Indigenous women and minorities in contexts of ongoing coloniality and settler-colonial contexts, such as Saskatoon.
Similarly, Landertinger (2017) argues that whiteness, race, and empire were the lenses through which the child welfare program in Canada from the 1880s to 2000 was constructed and should be examined. Situating child welfare within the context of nation-building, Landertinger (2017) contends that care for children, specifically white children, was pursued as a means to empire. That empire building process, colonial as it was, relegated others, that is, non-white children, to the fringes in early welfare initiatives in Canada. By centering attention on white children in Canada’s welfare system, Landertinger (2017) demonstrates that coloniality informed the formation of early Canadian child welfare programmes and continues to affect the form and shape of the welfare system. In a ground-breaking work, Valverde (2007) details how the Canadian process of nation-building was raced and gendered. The discourse of social purity and moral reform in Canada was dominated by Anglo-Saxon settlers who sometimes imported their social ideas from the United States and the mother country, Britain. In this process, minorities and women were subjugated to the moral imperatives imposed by the rich Anglo-Saxon patriarchy who sponsored and were shaping the process of Canadian nation-building. Concern about white children’s morality and purity fed from notions of perpetuating empire with children at the centre of the goal. In the process, the welfare state and institution became fixated on white rather than minority children and women in crafting responses to social ills.
These scholars all highlight the role of coloniality in shaping the Canadian welfare system including the specific institutional culture that eventually pervaded that system. Extending the colonial imperative of power and possession, the Canadian welfare system became a means to disproportionately gain custodial responsibility over Indigenous and racialized children. Also,
attitudes towards clients and service seekers of the Canada welfare system are informed by the history of colonial state-building in which the system essentialized the interest of some groups more than others based on race and gender. As indicated earlier, a welfare system rooted in colonialism and white supremacy essentially is of less benefit to minority races in terms of the support they may receive in coping with IPV. Alongside continue mistrust fostered through the forced removal of children into residential school and forced dislocation of Indigenous people from their lands, the gendered and racialized construction of social interventions further creates the tendency for survivors to seek informal help over formal help.