Mothers plead for help in getting fathers to pay

Mothers in Tobago are literally crying out over the length of time it takes to execute warrants for outstanding child maintenance payments, commonly referred to as “maintenance” warrants. The affected mothers are appealing to the authorities to do something urgently to address this vexing situation. The child maintenance payments are ordered by the Magistrates’ courts after a hearing in situations where mothers claim that the children’s fathers are not financially supporting their children. In cases where the court orders a father to make such payments on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, and he fails to do so, the mother then signs a warrant for his arrest.

When the warrant is executed, he is arrested and then taken before the court where he is ordered to make a lump sum payment of the outstanding payments, or serve a period of simple imprisonment. The problem, according to the aggrieved mothers, is that it takes a very long time for these warrants to be executed by the police. What this means is that these mothers keep going to court time after time and are told that the delinquent fathers cannot be located by the policeman responsible for executing the warrant. One such mother complained to Newsday yesterday that she had ‘signed’ a warrant on June 6 for the arrest of a man who owed child maintenance payments amounting to $800. To date, the errant father has not been arrested. She said she was told by police that they could not locate the man. “But the man is working in Scarborough. He is all over town,” the woman claimed.

The mother, who asked that her identity and that of the child’s father be withheld, told Newsday that the situation is further compounded by the fact that the man, perhaps out of spite, has not made any payments to the court since she ‘signed’ the warrant for his arrest. Meantime, she claimed, “The child is suffering, and school is opening just now,” she lamented. It was pointed out that this was just one of a number of such cases in which mothers are left virtually powerless in collecting child maintenance payments ordered by the courts. In most cases, the affected mothers allege that there seems to be some sort of collusion between the delinquent fathers and the warrant officers. Social services personnel on the island confirmed the situation, noting that they have had several complaints from aggrieved mothers. They, too, appealed to the authorities to do something about it.