STATE minister for education, youth and information Floyd Green says the police must push harder to bring child killers to justice, highlighting the alarming spate of child murders across the island.

He said that the clear-up rate of 50 per cent is not satisfactory, as this only means that someone has been arrested for the crime, not that someone has been convicted.

“We all have to do more. The Government has a part to play and the police have to ensure that persons who commit these crimes, their justice is swift and sure, and that there is no place to hide. The clear-up rate is at about 50 per cent, but that cannot be enough,” Green said yesterday.

He was speaking with secondary school students from across the island at a National Child Month Committee youth forum held at the St Andrew Parish Church hall.

The state minister said that the police have to do better in terms of making arrests and ensuring that they lead to convictions. He pointed out that although the figures have declined by 21 per cent over last year, 38 children being killed since the start of the year was still a grave problem.

According to Green, legislators are almost at the end of deliberations on a suite of laws that provide for the protection of women, children and other vulnerable groups. He stressed that the aim is to create harsher punishment for those who commit crimes against these groups.

“We are looking at our laws and our penalties and we believe, in a number of cases that relate to children and women, that our penalties are too soft and that we need more strident and stringent penalties to send a message that we are serious about protecting our women and children,” Green said. “Part of what the committee has been talking about is putting in special provisions [for] when a crime is committed against vulnerable groups.”

At the same time, the state minister said some of the difficulties being experienced in protecting the country’s children trace back to the relationships between some parents and their children. He said the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), in collaboration with the National Parenting Support Commission, would therefore be launching a wide-ranging campaign on communication strategies to assist parents with being more proactive.

Meanwhile, Green announced that since the merger of the Child Development Agency (CDA) and the Office of the Children’s Registry (OCR) a year ago, the backlog of cases of child abuse awaiting investigation have decreased from 5,000 to 400.

Last November, the CDA and the OCR were merged to form the CPFSA.

“We have been doing some things to make it easier to treat with the abuse and the protection of our system; so one of the things we have been trying to do is remove some of the bureaucracy in the system… The OCR, you would do reports to and they were referred to the CDA, and the CDA would investigate. Oftentimes there were slips in that process. We now have one entity that deals with the reports and the investigations, and we are seeing results,” he said yesterday.

In his sectoral presentation in May, the state minister had said the merger was now approaching its second phase, and that there would be an increase in the number of field staff to deal more effectively with the more than 13,000 cases being reported annually.

Yesterday’s forum, which was held under the theme “Affirm Me”, received major sponsorship from National Baking Company and GraceKennedy Group.