To the rescue of children

Nichola Harvey-Mitchell was announced last week as the new Director of the Children’s Authority. She takes over the role held by Safiya Noel for the last four years.

Noel’s tenure at the helm of the authority represented the lions’ share of the existence of the Authority, which was finally mobilised in 2015 and immediately began to grapple with the considerable issues that face children in TT.

Much of that time was spent evaluating the scope of domestic abuse affecting children in this country and engaging with an almost intractably complicated adoption process that does not serve the needs of children in state care nearly as well as it should.

In September 2019, the Authority sought to clarify some of the issues in adoption after president of the Rapidfire Kidz Foundation, attorney Kevin Ratiram, called on the public to start adopting children in community homes. Hanif Benjamin, the Authority’s chairman, pointed out that the first role it undertook in the process was to reunite children with their relatives.

Between 2015 and 2019 there were just 34 adoptions and most were formalisation of an existing caregiver relationship. Adoptions from the larger group of unplaced children living in homes are far less common and perhaps that was what Ratiram found so unfortunate, the prospect of so many children living in community residences until they came of age.

Earlier in 2019, at the opening of the Authority’s regional office in Tobago, Ayanna Webster-Roy, Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister, pointed out that many children in orphanages have parents who will neither care for them nor renounce their rights, freeing them for adoption. The Authority has also faced considerable work in mounting effective responses to the problems it has found. In 2017, its investigative unit was assigned 1,946 cases, of which 1,217 were characterised as high-risk.

The establishment of the Authority created a flood of reports of abuse, and it has answered more than 50,000 calls to its hotline and opened more than 21,000 cases of abuse. The Authority’s Investigative Unit works in collaboration with Regional Health Authorities, Student Support Services and Tobago’s Health and Wellness division. The Authority’s Child Support Centre has worked to accommodate children removed from abusive situations and placed 22 of the 36 children it took charge of in 2017.

While the rescue of any child from danger is important, the Authority would probably be the first to acknowledge that it has only begun to address the problem of abuse and abandonment and that the significant numbers of children at risk in its reports and unplaced in state care demand support for a robust and focussed response.