No abused child should live in silence

NO child should be abused, and no child should be abused and live in silence.

Chairman of the Children’s Authority Hanif Benjamin was very vocal about the abuse of children and the silence on the topic, saying most people considered child abuse “taboo.”

He spoke with Newsday on Tuesday after the authority’s Video and Art Competition to celebrate Universal Children’s Day at the Hyatt Regency, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain.

“I want us to remove that word taboo from the dictionary. That thing they call taboo, and the next thing is culture, that nonsense: it has to stop. Forget that taboo thing and come for counselling. We keep setting up counselling for parents and they are not coming because they shame. The parents are feeling ashamed – but the child is feeling the brunt of the shame.

“What is amazing about children is they are valuable, they are resilient and they can change, and they need an opportunity from us to help them to change. A child cannot change on their own. Once we get in there, that child could have a fruitful and beneficial life.”

Benjamin said the authority was trying to help people understand what child abuse was.

“We spoke about advocacy and helping to understand about abuse so we can get rid of abuse altogether. I don’t want reports to go down because people are not reporting, but because there is nothing to report.

“We are asking parents to be more vigilant. We are asking children to step out and step up when something is done to them inappropriately.”

Benjamin said the children’s art was amazing, but also painful. It meant a lot, he said, that the paintings depicted children’s suffering.

“We have a lot of work to do in relation to protection and the rights of a child. Every adult, including you and I...we will give our lives for our rights, so why shouldn’t we do the same for children? Children are like second and third class. It is like, ‘When we settle our rights we will go to their own.’ Children have rights, but not full rights. They don’t have a voice. Therefore it is what we tell them to do and how we tell them to do it.”

Touching on the murder of teenage mother Amy Leslie James, 19, whose decomposing body was found on Sunday, Benjamin said this was an issue that had to be dealt with.

James’s mother admitted her daughter was raped at eight and then nine by a relative, but never had counselling.

“We have to deal with it frontally. We keep burying our heads in the sand constantly. We keep abdicating our responsibility.

“No child should go through a lifetime of abuse like this. Research is saying when you start with this level of abuse and there is no intervention, you know where the end result is going. This is just tragic, tragic all over the place. It is a vicious cycle. It brings me to tears.”

Director of the authority Safiya Noel said the average number of reported cases per month for 2015-2018 was 398. The highest number of reports came in from the East-West Corridor, with 2.4 per cent in Tobago. More than 75 per cent of the victims were female.

Quoting the United Nations, Noel said, “The goal of Universal Children’s Day is to improve child welfare worldwide, promote and celebrate children’s rights and promote togetherness and awareness amongst all children.”