Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) is an agreement between the Government of Canada and approximately 86,000 Native Canadians who at some point were enrolled as children in the Canadian Indian residential school system, a system which was in place between 1879 and 1996. The IRSSA recognized the damage inflicted by the residential schools and established a $2 billion compensation package for all former IRS students and, in particular, those who had been abused or otherwise harmed. The agreement, announced in 2006, was the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. As of December 2012 a total of $1.62 billion has been paid to 78,750 former students.
Residential treatment center
In the 1600s, Great Britain established the Poor Law that allowed poor children to become trained in apprenticeships by removing them from their families and forcing them to live in group homes. In the 1800s, the United States copied this system, but often mentally ill children were placed in jail with adults because society did not know what to do with them. There were no RTCs in place to provide the 24-hour care they needed and they were placed in jail when they could not live in the home. In the 1900s, Anna Freud and her peers were part of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and they worked on how to care for children. They worked to create residential treatment centers for children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders.