Today, the organisation I have had the honour of being associated with for the past 15 years, the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM), will join with the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU), UNICEF and Caribbean media colleagues in launching Our Children, Our Media: A Guide for Media Practitioners.
This manual for Caribbean journalists was designed to raise critical issues associated with media coverage of children and their rights. It also has in mind the work of social media practitioners who play an increasingly important role in disseminating news, analysis, information and opinion on a wide variety of issues affecting us all.
It points to some areas of malpractice, but is not meant to be a club striking against the heads of journalists or social media practitioners.
This is just one of several resources the ACM has developed either on its own or in collaboration with institutional partners over the years. We have also, for example, published a handbook on the coverage of elections in the Caribbean; assisted with the production of a Climate Change Handbook for regional journalists and played a central role in development of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Tool Kit for Media on the subject of biodiversity.
Alongside what the organisation has been best known for, press freedom advocacy, the ACM has been engaged in valuable media development work, including training and the development of journalism resources over the years earning us international recognition and acclaim. I have always, in this respect, contended that high professional standards play a seminal role in addressing the growing challenges to freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
This is some background to the natural attraction the ACM had to the Child Rights project led by the CBU and funded by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) which climaxes today with the launch of the manual and termination of a workshop which opened yesterday and included media managers and newsroom leaders from other Caribbean states.
That we paid strong attention to this issue was never at any stage considered to be in contradiction with the important work the ACM and its national affiliates, including the Media Association of T&T (Matt), have to undertake to promote greater public awareness of the work of media professionals and to take action to ensure that conditions for the pursuit of quality journalism prevail.
We are however always quite aware of the fact that interventions on these matters are by no means politically neutral in the broadest meaning of the word "politics" and that people will have different perspectives on the issues we engage. There are others who stand with you one day and, once power arrangements change, are likely to work assiduously against you the next day when they begin believing their power or influence is being undermined.
This, by the way, is why politicians in opposition tend to be the media's greatest friends, until they achieve office, and those in power who lose their grip on power suddenly become allies and back-slapping pals once more.
My admonition related to this phenomenon has always been that people with an interest in freedom need to keep their shoulders to the wheel whatever the dynamics because rights and freedoms remain constant and unchanging.
So too with the rights of the child enshrined under the Convention on the Rights of the Child which was adopted in 1989, came into force on September 2, 1990 and ratified by this country on December 5, 1991–almost 25 years ago.
It was this Convention, and the ideals promoted under its 54 Articles, that helped inspire the adoption of new laws and different approaches to respect for the rights of the child here and in many other parts of the world. The Children Act of 2012 and the Children's Authority Act, together with another half a dozen other pieces of legislation, all strive for compliance with this Convention.
In a few places, the rights asserted are however deemed inimical to traditional practices and belief systems. For example, it has been amazing that open reference to "child marriages" in T&T passes without more public outrage. It has not served as a source of any apparent embarrassment that some believe that children are somehow "protected" under the umbrella of marriage.
It is interesting that some religious folk use the term "child marriage" shamelessly to support practices that prima facie conflict with, at minimum, the spirit of child protection regulations and other measures.
This discussion, to me, has been anything but a political distraction, and in fact faces the sad prospect of disappearing from the public agenda sooner rather than later. But it strikes at the core of the oft-witnessed conflict between cultural antecedent and rights and a view that human rights ought to be subject to some degree of relativism in their application.
One important role of the ACM/CBU manual would be to ensure that a concern for the rights of children remains an important feature of reportage on a wide variety of human activity. A society armed with sound journalism would make a much better go at a discussion currently too easily dismissed by the politically-inspired as peripheral and somehow distracting.