Establishing Children’s Authority,

In one of the Sunday papers of April 8, 2006 there were a couple of articles by a psychotherapist specialising in child abuse cases. She brought up, once again, the question of the Children’s Authority which has been so badly needed in Trinidad and Tobago, and for so many years. This has been a cry made by organisations such as the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Childline and other Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and one which the Chamber has supported over the years.

The main point, however, and one which the Chamber, conscious as we are of the need for planning and putting support structures into place to ensure that projects have a solid foundation, is the need to not just implement the Children’s Authority Act. That is important in itself and long overdue, but, in doing so, it is essential to make sure that a foundation is built on which the Authority can stand.

This means training the right people with the right skills for the Authority itself. It means filling the vacant posts of Social Workers, Probation Officers, Guidance Counsellors and others that have been vacant for so long, vacant in other departments of the Public Service, as well as providing for such support systems as assessment centres, half-way homes, and round-the-clock staff properly trained, supervised and paid, to run residential care facilities for children who have had to be taken into the care of the State. This could be because of the childrens’ emotional, physical or mental disabilities which parents have no expertise or ability to handle. It could be because parents have physically abandoned or psychologically abandoned their children, as parents who are substance abusers are often wont to do, having suffered such treatment as children themselves, sending them out into the night, locking the doors behind them. It could be because the parent or parents are themselves, for whatever reason, unable to care for their children. Children are abused by abandonment just as they are by corporal punishment and sexual abuse, and such children, indeed all children at risk, are to be helped by the Children’s Authority. That is why it was legislated for.

If the Government, in its wisdom, is planning to include an item in the National Budget for next year, as it used to do some years ago, to provide for a Children’s Authority, long since legislated for, it must make sure that the support structures are also budgeted and planned for. The pilot project for the establishment of a Family Court, has, to all reports been a very successful one. We need such courts in Tobago as well as in Central and South Trinidad. If the country is going into increased infrastructure development, it should be paying at least as much attention to such social support structures which benefit thousands of lives and by extension communities, as it is toward the provision of yet more sporting facilities which may only benefit comparatively small numbers of people.

The Chamber has been joining with other organisations in trying to be pro-active in finding ways, not only to react to violence, but in preventing violence from happening and from escalating into the future. It appears to us that attention to the foundations on which the future of our society — our children — is a fitting place to start. This cannot be done in understaffed class rooms with poor student to teacher ratios . . . it must be a part of all Government’s social and economic policies from infrastructure development to foreign policy, and it should be part of the attention that corporate structures give to their own Human Resources policies and systems.