No child should live in limbo

Last Sunday, Children’s Authority chairman Hanif Benjamin revealed the agency had dealt with 13,000 cases of abuse in the past two years. Today, he shares with JANELLE DE SOUZA his mandate to protect as many children as possible.

There is a belief among citizens that the Children’s Authority was established to take children away from their parents. But the agency’s new chairman, Hanif Benjamin, said he was here to dispel that notion.

“We are about care and protection. Even though we may have to remove the child because we have no other choice, we work with the parent to reunite them. One of my mandates is reunification. No child should spend eternity in a community residence or in limbo.”

He said the authority’s plans were designed to put the children and their parents in a better position so they could be reunited.

Benjamin told Sunday Newsday the authority received 50 to 60 calls every day and a total of about 45,000 calls over the past two years. He said people realised they could alert the authority to issues without being tied to it and so were now more willing to report incidences of abuse. He stressed that it was not the public’s job to investigate the situation. All they had to do was suspect and make the call, and the authority would determine the next steps.

He said although the authority was new in terms of its birth, as well as the fact that the country had never had such an agency before, it was effective, commending the staff for the data collected over its two years in existence.

He said during its three-year tenure, the new board, who received their instruments of appointment on August 25, aimed to build on the already solid footing of the authority. “A lot of the policies on which the authority operates would have been the starter policies...Now we are looking at crunching that data, to really figure out where we have to go, so a lot of the changes now has to be built on what came before, and looking at what is new.”

Benjamin is planning a strategic session for early next year and is convinced the members of his board are up to the task and described them as progressive and capable. “What I really like about them is that they are experts in their areas and they bring it to the table so when we are having conversations, we are having rich conversations. We are having it from a legal perspective, from a paediatrician perspective, from an educator’s perspective...They really, really, really put out the work.”

The board members really needed to put out the work because there were a number of challenges, including a backlog to catch up on as the authority had no board for a number of months.

Another issue was that of manpower. Benjamin said the agency was created to deal with 1,000 cases but has over 12,000. He said the board had already ordered an HR audit to ensure it had the right people in the right positions, and in the right numbers to manage the cases they have.

“It is not okay for any call to go unanswered and it is not okay for any case to not be dealt with as a matter of urgency.”

He praised the authority’s staff for “doing miracles,” working long hours, and generally doing the work of five or six people. He said because of the lack of staff, they had to prioritise cases and therefore it was unreasonable to criticise their response time. In spite of this, he asked the team to come up with ways to follow up and let people know the authority was on a case even if a representative did not show up immediately.

Another challenge was finances. Benjamin said the government seemed to realise the country’s children were in crisis and the authority was a critical agency that needed to ensure that, if a child needs it, it could respond.

“I was grateful to see an increase in the budget, and that shows that the government is seeing the need. We could do with a lot more because we are opening centres now in Sangre Grande, Chaguanas, Manahambre, and Tobago, because we need to disaggregate. That is part of reducing the case loads, reducing the waiting time, it means that the authorities have recognised the need for what we need to do.”

Seeing that the authority was expected to deal with children, 25 per cent of the population, and do so with limited finances, Benjamin said the agency had to become more strategic and creative in how they did things.

He said the authority had to focus on its priorities and to work closely with the Office of the Prime Minister. In this, he said stakeholder engagement was critical as different government agencies or NGOs could provide services, equipment, or personnel that the authority needed.

He said the authority already had partnerships with the police Child Protection Unit, was close to signing a memorandum of understand with the Counter-Trafficking Unit, and was hoping to develop more strategic partnerships.

In this, he already had talks with various ministries as well as the NGO United Way.

“We are talking to people because I believe that we cannot do it alone. We must partner with people and I am determined to get that policy out and signed by the end of 2018 with all of our partners.

“It’s not always give me $10, let us look at the pool of resources we have within the government and see what is already there that we can use. You see, if we do that, we will eliminate a lot of financial stress on us and that was what I talk about by being creative – working with little, seeing what we have and working with other entities...”.

Initiatives and implementation

One of Benjamin’s mandates was that a child should never have to go to a community residence unless it was unavoidable, so he prioritised adoption and the setting up of a foster care system. “I prefer if we have to take a child from a traumatic situation that we can place them in a home that could provide love and attention to them as opposed to going to a community residence which can be traumatising in itself again. So building our foster care has been a critical path for us.”

He described the law on adopting and fostering as vigorous and onerous, and said the process is a difficult one. However he appreciated that because it meant a child placed in the system would not be re-traumatised. He said over 180 people expressed interest in being foster parents since the call went out in August, and about 20 people were already registered. Now they have to look into more staff, including a team to monitor and evaluate to ensure the placement was working.

“The challenge we are facing, however, is the need to get foster carers who are specialised because we have a challenge with mental illness, development disabilities, as well as teenagers...We can provide you with help, the tools and the guidance. And you know a lot of times, all the children want is some love and attention, and their entire life would have changed.”

Benjamin explained that foster carers had to be checked and approved. This included background checks including financial, medical, and police checks, as well as speaking to neighbours. They would undergo ongoing, specialised training according to the type of child they foster, in addition to monitoring and evaluations, and would be given assistance and advice.

“I want TT to understand that the authority will walk with you. It is not that we drop a child and say, ‘Okay, later, see you.’ We will walk with you and we will provide the training, you get counselling, whatever it is to ensure that we have a good bond, we will do that.”

The authority also intends to pay attention to children with special needs as more needed to be done. He therefore asked his board to develop policies for children with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities, which they were in the final stages of drafting.

He said the legal team was also looking at laws to see how they could be amended for the best treatment of children. Part of it, he said, was that there needed to be an alignment between the Mental Health Act, the Children’s Authority Act, and the Education Act.

Then there is the authority’s education campaign.

He said the agency wanted to reach everyone, not just to inform them of what abuse was, but about abuse prevention, parenting, dealing with difficult children, and ways to discipline children. One idea was to develop booklets and posters to put in schools, health centres, government offices and other public places.

He said they would also like to acquire a bus so authority staff could park in a community for a day and teach people. Some of this education, he said, had already started at schools.

In addition, on November 20, the authority launched its Facebook page to provide members of the public with information.

He said most of the calls it received were about neglect and the sexual or physical abuse of a child. People did not understand that abuse had many forms, including emotional, psychological, and spiritual abuse.

Our culture, he said, was also part of the problem, so some children did not realise they were being abused because they believed what they were going through was normal. Some parents too did not realise they were doing anything wrong. “You know, long time, you growing up, you leave your 15-year-old boy or girl to watch everyone else, because that is the oldest. Something happen and we deal with it. But no! We are leaving our child and that is the challenge.”

Benjamin encouraged parents to be vigilant with their children, to recognise when their children were going through difficulties, and not to dismiss the signs. “I want parents to understand mental illnesses; I want parents to understand trauma and what is going on with their children... A lot of times, children don’t come out because they are afraid, because more likely than not … the people who are charged with the responsibility to care and protect for you are most times the people who hurt you as children. So it is difficult for a child to come out against someone that everyone thinks is loving and caring. So I’m saying to parents to be vigilant.”

However, he stressed that parenting was not just the job of a mother and father but of the community as children spent most of their time away from home. He therefore encouraged everyone to do their part because he said, “At the end of the day, if we fail, Trinidad fails.”