‘Failed’ system

By Shamar Blunt

Two prominent advocates have urged the strengthening of the nation’s social services to deal with the growing issue of young school girls going missing on a near-weekly basis.

Dr Marsha Hinds Myrie, an advocate against gender-based violence, and Shawn Clarke, CEO of Supreme Counselling for Personal Development, spoke to Barbados TODAY about the underlying causes behind these concerning incidents.

Dr Hinds Myrie said that while much of the public’s concern about children’s rights and the various forms of abuse they may face has recently focused on the Government Industrial School (GIS) and claims of improper punitive measures against its wards, problems faced by young and troubled teens continue to stem primarily from the homes in which they live.

“We stopped talking about the Government Industrial School and a lot of the issues that we tried to highlight in that advocacy, but because we stopped talking does not mean that those issues are not still with us. We were trying to make the point that a lot of the girls, children – but girls in particular – who go missing in Barbados are the victims of a failed social service, so a lot of these girls have run from sexual abuse within the home, particularly physical abuse as well.

“There are children who are facing high levels of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse. Emotional abuse always cohabits with physical and sexual abuse. There are children who have mental illness and wellness needs, sometimes diagnosed, sometimes undiagnosed. What our society has not come to terms with is how we treat two children with those kinds of needs in a humane way,” she said.

 

The advocate went on to emphasise that while children running away from home may appear to be a random act in the eyes of the public, “a lot of these children that are going missing are known to social services”. 

“So when they go missing, this is not the first time that they’re becoming known to the system. A lot of them have interacted with the Child Care Board from very tender ages. Some of them are known to police departments. So this is why I’m saying, I am not even so much focusing on the home because we like to dismiss this as ‘Oh, them parents that can’t control the children’. A lot of these children are children that have been failed by social services in Barbados.

“The point that I am making is that these children don’t have wrap-around services and support, and because they don’t have wrap-around or support, they fall through the gaps in our system. I think that is what we need to be focused on, not what the public imagination says they do when they go missing,” Dr Hinds Myrie contended.

This view was mirrored by Clarke who said that currently, there needs to be a focus on why these children are willingly leaving their homes.

“Work needs to be put in to bring back family life to what it used to be, where young people saw home as their haven. The reality is that these young people are trying to escape something…. The question is, what is it that they are trying to escape? Or what is it that they are going after that is probably not provided within the household? I think a lot more needs to go into investigating, in terms of studying, in terms of researching what is happening within the family unit.”

He added: “The reality is that to my mind, these young people should not go missing for seven days, 14 days, and then they are found, they go to the police station, there is an interview or whatever and then they are sent back home without any kind of intervention. I think that intervention is very important; it is very much needed to find out why is it that these young people are running away from home in the first place?”

Dr Hinds Myrie claimed that experienced social workers on the island have previously recognised the presence of a criminal element that preys on these vulnerable youngsters in cases where social services involvement fails.

“Our research and our experience has taught us that there are some rings in Barbados, human trafficking rings, where because of these gaps in our social services, some vulnerable children in Barbados are finding themselves at the mercy of these groups, and they are then forced to exchange sexual services and that kind of thing for survival. Now, if I know that and I operate on the outside of the system, the police [have] to know that, and the Child Care Board has to know that,” the women’s and girls’ advocate pointed out.

She also warned against the practice of reconnecting children with dysfunctional families.

“If you have a child who is facing sexual abuse in the home, and runs from that sexual abuse, and then your response to that child is to take and reunite it with the very family where it is being sexually abused, you have done nothing. When that child goes missing again, you can’t be surprised or confused.

“One of the biggest problems that we have in our system is that we are still unwilling to accept and to address the very high levels of child abuse in the society, and to take measures to protect children,” Dr Hinds Myrie added.

shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb