Authorities are being urged to come clean on what is happening at the Government Industrial School (GIS).
Former Opposition Leader Bishop Joseph Atherley made the call as he expressed concern about the conflicting information coming out about the state-run institution, in particular the Female Unit at Barrows, St Lucy.
“We have to stop playing around with this situation. It is children we are dealing with here. We have to stop playing around with this. One is unclear as to what is happening. People who speak officially on behalf of the Government speak from a situation where they are properly informed. And then, conversely, we get the impression that people outside of Government speak as equally informed and based on proper information. So you are confused,” he lamented in an interview with Barbados TODAY.
“You get the impression that an investigation is ongoing and reports will be done. What happens after those reports, why is the investigation taking so long and some of these things are critical? You have had people whose lives have come close to being imperiled, if we are to believe all that we are hearing in terms of suicide attempts and absconding and so on,” added the Chairman of the Alliance Party for Progress (APP).
In recent months, issues of wards running away from the Female Unit and some allegedly attempting suicide have been heavily publicised, leading to advocates expressing outrage and calling for serious investigations to be conducted into what is happening at the penal reform institution for juveniles.
In May this year, Minister of Home Affairs Wilfred Abrahams announced there would be a full departmental enquiry into operations at the GIS.
Providing an update last week, he told members of the media that the panel was waiting on one witness, a current ward who absconded from the institution, to come forward and give her statement before the enquiry is closed and a report is completed.
Abrahams had chastised the media for reporting on claims by a grandmother that her granddaughter had ingested a mix of substances on July 9 attempting to take her own life, saying that after the ward was taken to hospital she denied taking any substances and that a toxicology report reflected this.
On Monday, however, Barbados TODAY reported that a staff member was suspended from duty with full pay pending the outcome of a probe into reports that two female wards had allegedly ingested harmful substances under her watch on July 9.
Bishop Atherley said that while investigations are necessary, authorities “can’t hide behind them”.
“I think Minister Abrahams is a man whose heart is in the right place, but I am not too sure that as a country that we are going about these things the right way,” said the APP leader.
“But I have always had concerns about juvenile justice in Barbados. We need to have serious juvenile justice reform done in Barbados,” he added, complaining that the system currently institutionalises boys and girls at the GIS for three years for the “outrageous” charge of wandering.
Atherley also suggested that the management of the GIS should be relocated from the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Ministry of Education.
