MORE than three years after the Keating report painted a damning picture of the island’s 45 children’s homes and 12 places of safety, concerns are again mounting among several interest groups who say they are not certain the lives of the children in care have improved significantly since the report.

In 2003, the government commissioned retired civil servant Sadie Keating to lead investigations into allegations of sexual abuse at government and private children’s homes and places of safety. The investigation was sparked after a crusade by Jamaican Kay Osborne, who discovered that the child she had attempted to adopt had been sexually abused while in state care.

In 2004, Parliament passed the Child Care and Protection Act creating the Child Development Agency, which replaced the Children Services Division of the health ministry and saw the production of the first service manual, specifying how children’s homes are to be run.

But among the fresh concerns being mooted are that the draft children’s homes regulations, which are three years late, and the children’s registry regulations are “woefully inadequate”, and will do nothing to improve the status of minors in children’s homes across the island when brought into force. Both regulations are yet to be brought to Parliament for approval.

Executive director of human rights group Jamaicans For Justice Dr Carolyn Gomes has criticised both sets of proposed regulations.

“Our criticism of the children’s homes regulations is that they are far too general, they are far too non-specific and they are not going to be too very helpful as they are now drafted in the process of holding people accountable or even in establishing standards, they are not specific enough,” Gomes told the Sunday Observer.

“For example, the draft we have seen says there must be adequate staff, but what is adequate staff? What is the ratio of staff to child? What are adequate nutrition standards? It shouldn’t be in some document that somebody is going to have to go and look for, those types of standards need to be set out in the children’s homes regulations and the registry’s regulations, so that accountability can be enforced,” Gomes noted.

Former Children’s Homes Superintendent Frank Worrell told the Sunday Observer that the children’s homes regulations as they stand would prove useless in stamping out the present levels of corruption in the system.

“There is a culture in the system that once you are in it, your duty is to protect the system at all costs and that is one of the things that if not exposed and if not addressed the children are going to continue to suffer,” Worrell told the Sunday Observer.

According to Worrell, while he had no “vendetta against the system” he was “glad to be out”.

“While I was there, I encountered these things and you dare not say anything. You are there, you have a duty to protect the wrongs done there. You are expected to cover it as the superintendent. You are expected to shut the people out of the institution who would come in and see it, and speak about it,” Worrell said.

According to one source who spoke to the Sunday Observer on the condition of anonymity, most homes were run by “very well-placed, very well-known, well-regarded church people, with connections to the NGO community, the political community, making it very difficult to get people to challenge them”.

He suggested that the vagueness of the regulations were deliberate, and claimed that one government official, during the consultations, had argued that if the regulations were too detailed “no one would want to run our children’s homes”.

“It all goes back to the regulations, that’s the crux. The law (Child Care and Protection Act) says what should happen, but it doesn’t give the means to bring that about; and that’s where the regulations come into play. As long as the regulations are not in place nobody can enforce that law,” he noted.

“Why is it that these regulations have not been passed yet? Who is benefitting from that? I have the latest draft and it’s no different from the original draft and it is not worth the paper it’s written on. There is absolutely no specificity in terms of the actual running of the home. There is no legality, it’s all subjective,” the source told the Sunday Observer.

“Unless you have regulations that say ‘there has to be one staff member for every eight children, one commode for every five children’ unless you have that, anybody can walk in and look around and say I’m satisfied,” the source complained.

His claim was backed up by Worrell, who said when an inspection was carried out, “nobody cared about whether there were adequate facilities, care, or psychological intervention for the children who are suffering”.

According to Worrell, the regulations, being outstanding, set the stage for a repeat of several instances in which children were abused sexually by known offenders and justice was not brought until it was too late.

Worrell said this had been the case in one home which was under his supervision. The former children’s homes superintendent said no action was taken against a children’s officer who had allegedly been molesting the young boys in his care since 1997, even after the officer had been reported to the Children’s Services Division.

“The individual is now on trial for molesting a nine-year-old boy at another institution. He had not ceased to be a children’s officer all this time. So, from 1997 until last year, he has been on the loose. I told the people at Children’s Services, and nothing was done until last year when he was arrested. So, all those boys have been abused over the years,” Worrell claimed.

He also noted that background checks were far from adequate, noting that in at least one other instance a counsellor with a reputation for abuse had been hired to run a children’s home from which he had resigned. He said “repeated warnings” to the board “all fell on deaf ears”.

The Sunday Observer also learnt that some homes have been pulling trainees from several teachers’ colleges to provide guidance counselling services.

“In the regulation, there is no guideline as to what staff a home is to have. So when a home doesn’t have a nurse or a counsellor you know what they say? We don’t have the money and so the government says we will supply them. You know the way guidance counsellors are supplied by the government? They are pulling in students from colleges and this is considered guidance counselling,” the source said.

He further alleged that there were “numerous situations of vehicles, furniture and even land that board members steal and use for their own purposes”.

“Nobody checks, and until the regulations are in place and people are transparent with the money, you are wasting your time,” he said, pointing out that requests for account information for several homes had been blocked by the CDA, the explanation being that they were under no obligation to provide same, as the regulations were not in place.

But for Gomes, the proposed regulations which will detail the day-to-day operation of the children’s registry – which has already begun receiving reports of child abuse – leave a lot to be desired.

“The regulations as to how the registry is to operate, who is to receive the complaint, what is to be done with it, are not there…those are not clarified and set out, and it is the same thing with the draft children’s homes regulations. They are much too vague,” Gomes pointed out, noting that regulations accompanying child laws in other jurisdictions were “far superior”.

According to Gomes, although these concerns were voiced in consultations with the health ministry and the Child Development Agency more than a year ago, the JFJ has “not seen any of (their) concerns reflected in the new draft”.

As to the insistence of the CDA that there was a “fully robust monitoring system”, Gomes said while that might be so the action taken was of far more import.

“Our concern has been that monitoring is one thing, taking action is another and without the regulations and without proper systems we are not clear that the lives of the children in the homes have improved significantly since the time of the Keating report. We are not seeing a lot of action in response to complaints that are monitored,” the JFJ head told the Sunday Observer.

The JFJ, in a 2006 report to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), said the process of evaluation and the monitoring reports developed by the CDA are not sufficiently guaranteeing that the children in care are being provided with the highest quality of care and treatment. It said its findings showed inefficiency and inadequacy, which led to a lack of follow-up or corrective action for issues being faced within the homes.

The report said, to the best of its knowledge, as of October, 2006 the CDA remained unaware of how many children in its care are challenged visually, audibly, physically, mentally, psychologically or educationally, and how many need special assistance and attention as well as the nature of the assistance needed.

The JFJ head told the Sunday Observer that it was hoped that the concerns being raised would not be allowed to fall between the cracks, leaving a useless set of regulations on the books.

“At this point the regulations have to be approved by Parliament (and) one presumes our parliamentarians would be interested in putting in place proper standards. And, so, one would hope that when these concerns are brought they would take them on board,” Gomes noted.

Last month, the Sunday Observer was told that a revised first draft of the regulations for the registry is now in the possession of the chief parliamentary counsel.