Police must protect the children at the homes

THE EDITOR: The ongoing children’s home abuse imbroglio has left me bewildered. How can the most vulnerable be abused by the very “caretakers” who are paid to look after them?

But worse than that, after the abuse and neglect surfaced decades ago, a task force was commissioned to investigate those horrific reports of abuses. The findings were subsequently buried and lost by the task force that sat back and did nothing.

Every single member of the task force must be held accountable for this failure to launch an immediate police investigation into its findings. Even if the chairman sat on the report and claimed that it was not the task force’s job to prosecute the wrongdoers the commission unearthed, any one of the remaining members could have unilaterally gone to the police, the media, or even the President of TT.

Why, one may legitimately ask, would they all remain silent? Instead of becoming the heroes of the beleaguered children and the nation, they closed their eyes to crimes that have the whole country shaking their heads in utter disbelief.

Consider that in any study, whenever ongoing blatant wrongdoings are discovered that place the subjects at physical and emotional risk, ethics and morality demand that the findings be immediately brought to the authorities’ attention to protect the children and end the misconduct.

It is vital to the safety of the children at all these homes that they should immediately, without any further ado, be placed under police supervision to ensure their protection. This cannot wait for another probe or another commissioned report, for clearly they are useless.

The police need to act hastily and without warning so that the children will not be coerced into protecting their abusers. As we have learned from the Stockholm Syndrome, young minds can be easily manipulated to lie to protect the abuser with promises of goodies or further retribution threats.

REX CHOOKOLINGO

rexchook@gmail.com