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Friday, July 11, 2025

Act to save children

by

20140120

The of­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tion about child abuse re­sumed last week as the Gov­ern­ment ac­knowl­edged the pre­lim­i­nary find­ings of the Child Pro­tec­tion Task Force.On Thurs­day, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar an­nounced that the Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty was crit­i­cal­ly un­der­staffed, op­er­at­ing with less than a fifth of its com­ple­ment of staff and of­fi­cers.That sit­u­a­tion was not al­le­vi­at­ed by her as­ton­ish­ment at the sit­u­a­tion.

Her sur­prise, ul­ti­mate­ly, must be tem­pered by the sim­ple fact that she is in a po­si­tion to do some­thing about it and to do so with dis­patch.The sta­tis­tics of­fered by the Prime Min­is­ter de­scribe the prob­lem of child abuse in in­tim­i­dat­ing terms. Sex­u­al of­fences and rob­bery are by far the lead­ing crimes com­mit­ted against chil­dren, at 42 per cent each, and chil­dren to­day are a quar­ter of the coun­try's pop­u­la­tion.

The ques­tion here is not why the Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty is un­der­staffed to the point of in­ef­fec­tive­ness.What must be asked is how a fourth of the pop­u­la­tion, and its most vul­ner­a­ble quar­tile at that, re­mained ex­posed to dan­gers that are known, un­der­stood and sta­tis­ti­cal­ly mea­sured for so long.Leg­isla­tive so­lu­tions have been pro­posed and passed in­to law and re­main unim­ple­ment­ed be­cause of a lev­el of bu­reau­crat­ic in­ep­ti­tude that is still to be prop­er­ly ex­plained.

www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers


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