Revealing Jamaica's soul - Moving to a new day

This is the fifth and final column in a series by Jamaicans for Justice in commemoration of Child Month, which ended last Friday.

Child Month 2013 focused the nation on myriad issues in relation to the care and protection of our children. The high incidences of abuse and the continuing appalling state of the children in state care demonstrate a national crisis.

May 22, 2013 marked the fourth anniversary of the horrific tragedy at Armadale. Four years later and the children who suffered that devastating tragedy have not been compensated. Four years later and there are reports that the practice of lockdown continues at juvenile correctional institutions. Four years later and children who have been abused may still find themselves in penal institutions while their abusers continue to roam the streets.

LITTLE OR NO ACTION

The response of successive administrations has been the commissioning of task force after task force and report after report, with little or no action. Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ) calls on the nation to hold the State to a higher standard and demand that the Government immediately put in place tangible, specific reforms geared towards the best interests of the children.

In this spirit, JFJ has compiled a list of recommendations for enforceable steps towards badly needed improvement in this sphere. These measures are sampled from both internal and external sources, and are far from an exhaustive list of the needed reforms. Despite this, they represent the focused, action-oriented line of thinking required to enact the effective and long-term changes that will impact the groups of children profiled this month.

1.Remove children from the Horizon Remand Centre, Fort Augusta adult and police lock-ups. As has been repeatedly pointed out by civil-rights groups and international institutions, the conditions in these facilities place the Jamaican State in direct violation of international law, most notably Jamaica's 2004 Child Care and Protection Act and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

To aim for the good, one must first attain the acceptable; the standards approved by both local and international standards are, by all measures, what dictate the acceptable.

2.Remove the designation of 'uncontrollable child' from the legislation as a reason to incarcerate a child. This label has been grossly abused and overprescribed: from 2009 to 2012, 154 children were remanded on this 'charge'. It has been the legal gateway to years of abuse and neglect for many young Jamaicans, who initially required little more than attention and guidance. As a protective measure, it has unequivocally failed, and should be eliminated.

3.Provide access to substantive legal counsel for children who come before the courts. A legal system that allows 68 per cent of children to fend for themselves in front of a court with no legal representation is broken. A court of law is the institution designed to enforce justice; it cannot do that if there is none present in its own proceedings.

4.Ensure that the incarceration of children is applied only as a measure of last resort and only implemented in truly exceptional cases. In these instances, make every effort to minimise incarceration to the shortest time possible. In 2012, 73 per cent of children were incarcerated for non-violent offences, such as drug use and shoplifting. Incarceration is not, and cannot continue to be seen as, a go-to solution for every child that makes a mistake. Overincarceration is a drain on present and future resources and should only occur when no better intervention can be determined.

5.Make every effort to ensure that the psychological and medical needs of all children held in institutions throughout the country are identified and addressed. As was highlighted by the March 2013 report by the Office of the Children's Advocate, many of the children who enter state care require special care, and many of them fail to receive it.

This severely impacts their ability to cope, psychologically and emotionally. Fixing this involves the consistent application of intake assessment, follow-up assessment, and periodic reviews of each child's situation and management.

6.Grant all wards of the State, including children remanded after coming in conflict with the law, equal access to adequate educational opportunities. As it currently stands, too many children are deprived of acceptable educational resources, with some wards at Horizon Adult Remand Centre receiving on average two hours of instruction a day.

The Child Care and Protection Act makes clear that it is the State Duty "to ensure that [a] child is educated at school. There is no exception because the child is in an institution." All children are entitled to equal opportunities for advancement. Basic education is certainly the foundation of this.

7.Create smaller rehabilitative centres, not juvenile jails. These centres should house children exclusively, and provide adequate sanitary facilities. They should offer acceptable standards of education and skills training to their wards, and emphasise progressive development rather than punitive detention.

SEVEN STEPS TO SUCCESS

These seven steps, if properly implemented, would represent significant progress in repairing a failing system. The solution to our current problem is not an easy or quick one; nor, however, is it a complicated one.

It is no great secret that our current childcare institutions have, in some ways, deteriorated to little more than glorified detention centres - institutions best designed to separate and contain an isolated cohort of children, rather than fully nurture and raise them.

Most of the steps presented here are part of a larger push for the administrative reimagining of the child-care facility and its function: to lift up, not lock up, our children.