Fresh strategy needed to tackle social ills, says minister

By Shamar Blunt

Barbados requires a fresh strategy to tackle the social problems amid growing numbers of homeless people and mental health challenges, the minister for welfare said Friday.

Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs Kirk Humphrey put the spotlight on a raft of evictions of entire families as he addressed officials at a stakeholder consultation on homelessness at the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business and Management.

He said that with the continuing breakdown of family and community structures in society, more people are being forced into homelessness at an alarming rate, with women and children no longer being spared.

The minister told the forum: “I have become very concerned in the Ministry of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs, that almost every week there are about three or four cases of evictions. A lot of this is not necessarily persons being evicted from a landlord they have to pay, a lot of this is family members evicting, or as we say in Barbados ‘putting out’, other family members.

An emerging trend is that people are now putting out women and children.

“Previously, children would be accommodated either by the family member or by another family member or family friend, but we are now seeing people evicting children as well. So there is a change in the nature of our homelessness, inasmuch as we are seeing an increase in homelessness.”

In addition to homelessness, the COVID- 19 pandemic has exposed several other social issues, he said.

“In a post-COVID environment we saw, especially immediately after COVID, a level of compassion and concern, but that is quickly going away,” Humphrey said.

“We are returning to normal, but Barbados has to have a new normal. COVID was as much a social issue as it was a health and a medical issue. In fact, the real repercussions of COVID are social. [Anecdotally] we saw during COVID, an increase in domestic violence for sure. We heard of children when they went back to school after the schools were reopened – reporting and the statistics will bear it out – that there was an increase in the number of reports, by children, of abuse.

The schools then became an opportunity for them to report that abuse [from] when they were home, and we saw a number of families falling apart within that COVID time.”

Kayrene Heallis, a National Assistance Board social worker attached to the 24-hour Clyde Gollop Shelter, observed that the number of people being deported to Barbados is another rising factor in homelessness.

“A lot of the gentlemen that return to Barbados through the route of deportation, seeing that they were in the ‘big countries’ for a number of years, when they come back – [because] some of them were gone [since] they were seven, some were five – they don’t know where to find their family. A lot of them would have left the existing family members where they were living, so when they come back then, they don’t know where to start,” she said.

In the face of these mounting challenges, including drug use and suicide, Humphrey called for a modern and effective social policy, crafted jointly by the government and various charitable and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“It has to be a social policy that makes sense for all of us,” he said. “It cannot be a policy for the NGO community, and one for the private sector, then one for the government. It has to be a policy that is crosscutting, that makes sense for Barbados.

“We need a system that works, and I think one of the bigger questions that we have to ask and answer is,

‘What is happening in our households that is driving young people to this increase in drug use [and] this recent increase in suicide as well?’ That is why I am saying we cannot have these conversations in isolation,” the minister contended.

shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb