Need to protect the children

A MAN, possibly a police officer, got away with repeatedly abusing a 12 year old girl, lamented outspoken Pastor Clive Dottin, relating a sad story to the Senate yesterday visiting the Independent bench.

“I was called to deal with a girl in East Trinidad, and she is not the only case. I’ll not call the exact place. A Form 1, Form 2 secondary school student in East Trinidad was abused by a person 40 years her senior, emotionally and otherwise, on the road.

“Shockingly, shockingly, this young lady, the case went to the police, it went to the school, and amazingly it even went to a religious leader and all sectors of society failed that girl. For three years!”

Speaking on a bill on the care of vulnerable youngsters in State-run homes, he said passing a lot of laws will make no impact unless heads of institutions are committed to actually enforcing them.

“How could a 12 year old girl...The parents did not know what to do. The house became a jail,” he related. “In the Police Service you have something called ‘batch loyalty’. I fear one of the serious challenges the new Commissioner of Police will have is that of batch loyalty.”

Dottin said while 80 per cent of police are good, a tablespoon of gramoxone could poison a whole litre of water. “This child, we had to get counselling for her outside of the system.”

He told a tale of a bright primary school pupil whose mother refused to let him go on to secondary school, but said he must work to take care of her. “Today that youngster is one of TT’s biggest drug-lords,” Dottin lamented. He related that a father had once tried to sue him for trying to save the man’s children from neglect caused by him gambling away all the household money.

Dottin mulled the bizarreness of the attempted lawsuit in South Trinidad where the corrupt seek protection from the innocence, when it should be the other way around. Dottin said the bill suggests a need for an increase in counsellors at State homes, but did not know where they could be found as they were in short-supply even in schools.