We analyse 4300 advertisements of children featured in the Today's Child column, a daily written by Helen Allen in The Toronto Telegram and The Toronto Star from 1964 to 1982, to understand how the Canadian public became accepting of the adoption of Indigenous children. While children of all ethnic backgrounds were featured, the Indigenous children who were displayed were part of a larger system of child removal, known as the ‘Sixties Scoop’. We demonstrate the ways Indigenous children are described with a specific form of happiness that is conjoined with colonial conceptions of the family and nation.

No abstract

In the current article, we document the changing roles and responsibilities related to the implementation of the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act ( YCJA). Police officers’ experiences and responses to the implementation of the YCJA reveal a disparity between the officers’ idealised role and their actual tasks involving youth. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus and field, we consider the field of youth justice and its effects on rural policing strategies in Canada. We consider the shifting standard for police behaviours from data gathered through interviews and focus groups with police officers. We find standards in the field of policing shift to reflect new realities enacted with the YCJA.

No abstract

We examine 4,300 advertisements of children who were featured in Today’s Child, a daily newspaper column written by Helen Allen in the Toronto Telegram and Toronto Star (1964–1982) and syndicated across North America. We highlight how stigma and values were attributed to adoptive children featured in these advertisements. Our findings reveal how the advertisements perpetuated and attached stigma to these children and how this stigma had to be compensated for the children to appeal to prospective parents. Compensatory strategies were ultimately required to manage stigma and increase the value of the featured children.