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Nobody Looked: The Jeffrey Baldwin Case

In 1998, a Toronto children's aid society approved a grandmother and her husband as legal guardians of four small children. The agency held a file on the woman that went back almost thirty years. It held a conviction for assaulting her own five-month-old daughter, and records on the man she lived with, who had beaten two of her other children into hospital. Nobody checked any of it.

Four years later, five-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin was dead. He weighed twenty-one pounds, about what he weighed on his first birthday.

This episode follows the case from the agency's early files to the criminal trial and the 2013 coroner's inquest. It covers the decisions that put Jeffrey in that house and the warnings that went nowhere. It also covers what the jury recommended, and how much of it has been done.

In this episode:

• How a grandmother's persistent concern was recorded in the file as "a family strength"
• Why criminal record checks were run on the parents losing the children, and never on the grandparents gaining them
• The caseworker's inquest testimony: "We get what we get"
• Life inside the house, and the six adults who did not speak up
• The trial, the second-degree murder convictions and the appeals
• The inquest: 103 recommendations and the slow rollout of CPIN, Ontario's shared information system
• Six practice strands for professionals: kinship care assessment, file closure at placement, information systems, strengths-based practice without verification, bystanders, and the invisible pre-school child
• Questions for anyone working with children and families

Content note: this episode describes severe child neglect and abuse, including starvation and confinement. Listener discretion is advised.

If you work with children and families, please share this episode with a colleague. If it was useful, subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

Sources include the Abell independent review of the Catholic Children's Aid Society of Toronto, coverage of the trial and inquest by CBC, Global News, CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Ontario government service documents on CPIN.