The Institute of Islamic Studies (IIS) is proud to announce a new research project that will explore Muslim families’ experiences with the child welfare system in Ontario. This project will be housed under the IIS’ Structural Islamophobia Research Lab (SIRL).
Limited research on child welfare system and Muslim’s experience There is a growing concern in Muslim communities and child welfare services that work closely with Muslims that Muslim children are overrepresented in Ontario’s child welfare system. Muslims are the second largest religiously affiliated group in Canada after Christians (“Religion in Canada”), and the population of Muslims in Canada has doubled in the last 20 years (“The Canadian Census”), yet there is limited research on how Muslim children in care, Muslim families, and Muslim adoptive and foster parents experience Ontario’s child welfare system.
Mixed research approach towards policy recommendations Using qualitative methods, this project centers the experiences of Muslim families and Muslim children by interviewing families, community advocates, and social workers to better assess the conditions under which Muslim families are involved with child welfare services in Ontario and how they navigate these circumstances. The objective of performing interviews is to establish if Muslim communities face unique sets of obstacles in their involvement with Ontario’s Children’s Aid Societies and how Muslim children’s, families’, and communities’ needs can be addressed.
This research project, furthermore, confronts the necessity of tracking and maintaining empirical data on Muslim children and families who come into contact with child welfare, including children and youth who are placed in out-of-home care. As a result, the aim of this new research focus is to also use quantitative methods to document how many Muslim children, youth, and families experience child welfare involvement to determine whether and how they are overrepresented in Ontario’s child welfare system, the circumstances and nature of their involvement, and their trajectories through the system. These data will support the development of policy recommendations that better serve Muslim children, families, and communities.
Call for interest by affected members and/or stakeholders Given the sensitive nature of this research, the IIS is open to connecting with community members or organizations who have a shared interest in examining this subject. Interest can range from providing recommendations for literature review, participating in qualitative interviews, or advisory roles to support securing data and disseminating future findings.
Dr. Sharifa Patel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies’ Structural Islamophobia Research Lab (SIRL) at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies and an MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Research from McMaster University, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Patel’s research examines Islamophobia within Canadian policies and how these policies specifically affect Muslim families. Her dissertation research analyzed framings of the Muslim family as a space of patriarchal violence in Canadian news media and political discourses (such as House of Commons debates). In her capacity as the W. P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University, she examined Canada’s intercountry adoption policy, which restricts intercountry adoptions from countries that use the Islamic practice of kafala, arguing that the policy is inherently Islamophobic.
About the Structural Islamophobia Lab (SiRL) Much of the public framing of Islamophobia tends to examine public discourses that are often part of the larger cultural milieu. However, this approach often ignores the way in which Islamophobia is systemically enabled by the very institutions that govern Canada, that educate Canadians, and that make possible our individual market participation. Structural Islamophobia is a difficult research subject because the evidence is often hidden whether for reasons of privacy, intellectual property, or national security. But that does not mean structural Islamophobia does not exist.
SIRL exists to sponsor scholarship examining the formation and operation of Islamophobia in the form of institutional policy or bureaucratic practice, and explore them using creative research methodologies.
Date: November 19, 2024 | Time: 4:00 to 5:00 PM | Location: Zoom Register Here Description: In 2016, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) began a public interest inquiry into Indigenous and racialized children’s and youth’s involvement with Ontario’s child welfare system. In their 2018 report, Interrupted Childhoods: Over-representation of Indigenous and Black Children in Ontario Child Welfare, the OHRC found that Black […]
The Structural Islamophobia Research Lab (SIRL) Fellowship The Structural Islamophobia Research Lab (SIRL) – at the Institute of Islamic Studies (IIS), University of Toronto – supports the best and brightest minds committed to examining institutionally entrenched modes of Islamophobia that defy simplistic analyses and require creative research methods. This page will list three SiRL post-doc […]
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