Mrs Betty-Ann Blaine has earned our respect for her long, hard and selfless work on behalf of our nation’s children, from her days as head of the Voluntary Organisation for the Upliftment of Children (VOUCH) to her current leadership of the child rights organisation Hear The Children’s Cry.

Having given the best years of her life to this cause, we are delighted, if surprised by the fervour with which the passion still burns, and that the fire in her belly refuses to be doused by the innumerable challenges faced by Jamaica’s children, the palpable lack of resources to tackle them, and now the rising tide of violence, including sexual abuse, against these precious innocents.

The typical Jamaican child is poor; barely educated; vulnerable to paedophiles; exposed to acts of crime and violence; at risk of being raped, trafficked, and of becoming pregnant, which leads to her dropping out of school. An average of 150 of them go missing from home each month, according to child rights activists, who say, although many return home, many do not and end up killed or never heard from again.

For these and other reasons, we endorse Mrs Blaine’s call on Prime Minister Andrew Holness to convene an emergency child summit, bringing together all critical stakeholders, “geared at immediate implementable action to improve the lives of a large majority of Jamaica’s children who continue to suffer from untenable levels of abuse, including horrendous levels of violence in many communities”.

In her New Year’s message, Mrs Blaine also urged the Government to seek to partner with the country’s churches, and a critical international body such as UNICEF Jamaica, to “carry out a national child social audit which would look specifically at living conditions in homes and communities, including a range of extremely negative conditions like the serious levels of poverty and woefully inadequate parenting skills”.

We would imagine that the partnership would also include Children First, the Child Development Agency, the Office of the Children’s Advocate and Registry, as well as the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse, among others joined in the cause.

It is her view, and we agree, that the endorsement and leadership of the summit and audit by Mr Holness “would send the strongest message across the society, that as a nation we are taking the matter of child security seriously”.

Importantly, Mrs Blaine recognises that the emergency summit cannot be another talk shop, but an event for the swift production of a ‘doable’ action plan, based on a short list of actions that can be implemented right away.

In the meantime, Hear the Children’s Cry should be commended for its continued work in advocacy, research, documentation and publication, public education and counselling of returned missing children and family members of missing children, as well as its islandwide programme of child safety presentations to schools and communities.

Jamaicans will remember the organisation’s drive to launch the Ananda Alert on behalf of missing children in 2009, and it is noteworthy that it has become the first English-speaking Caribbean organisation to be a member of the Global Missing Children’s Network.