One could feel the concurrent passion and frustration exuding form Betty Ann Blaine as she shared the painful truth that “We are still in a crisis.”

Blaine, founder of Hear the Children’s Cry, was a guest at the Jamaica Observer Press Club on Thursday when she expressed that though Jamaica is equipped with more than enough laws, agencies and entities to efficiently tackle issues affecting children, the reports of abuse remain a daunting concern.

She said Hear the Children’s Cry was founded 20 years ago out of an urgent need for action, during a period where eight children were murdered in Jamaica in two weeks.

“A group of us said there’s no way we can live like this. We mobilised the children, primary and high schools, parents and marched along Spanish Town Road. And then we had a rally. And that’s how we started. We started out of a crisis and 20 years later, we’re still in a crisis of sorts. We’ve made some improvements with universal education, with child mortality and so on. But we’re still in a crisis,” Blaine told the Sunday Observer.

“We have a little over 800,000 children in this country… certainly under a million. So, it’s not a lot of kids. We have in this country, 10 pieces of legislation to protect children,” she continued.

Blaine listed several, including the Child Care and Protection Act, the Child Care and Protection Children’s Homes Regulations, the Child Care and Protection Children’s Registry Act, the Child Pornography Act, and the Sexual Offenses Act.

“In addition to that, we have a multiplicity of agencies to protect children in Jamaica. We have the Office of the Children Advocate; thank God for Diahann Gordon Harrison. We have the Child Protection and Family Services Agency, we have the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse, we have guild guidance clinics and in addition to all of those, almost every governmental ministry has some responsibility for children in some form or fraction. And to all of those, over 3,000 non-governmental organisations including churches and clubs,” she lamented.

The question Jamaica should now ask, she added, is “How is it that in a country with so many laws and so many entities to protect a little over 800,000 children, we are talking about this?”

“I ask it all the time,” Blaine said. “Something is radically wrong. We are not getting to the root of it. The root of it is family life. We will never, in this country, fix the problem of children without fixing the problem of families simultaneously. That is my position when it is all said and done,” she told the Sunday Observer.

Meanwhile, Andre Miller, social policy manager at the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), said one of the things observed during the novel coronavirus pandemic is that the system is not able to be “agile enough and responsive enough” to meet critical needs of families.

“Yes, the Government had the Cares programme. However, we recognised that it was not able to disperse the resources in as quicker time as it needed to. So, several persons were plunged further into poverty. We did a study and we found that families were trying to pull together just to have a sizeable mean or a meal that was nutritious enough for their children,” he told the Sunday Observer.

“In fact, some families went at least two days without eating so that they could manage the expense of the family. We also recognise that we tend to look at the broad headings of the family and the family in poverty. But when you look at the specific categories, for example, a family having to care for a child with a disability, it become smore concerning.”

Children’s Advocate Diahann Gordon Harrison weighed in, telling the Sunday Observer that she is seeing children being in crisis right across the spectrum.

Agreeing with Blaine about the need to address the issue of children’s family life, Gordon Harrison further pointed to a story published in the Sunday Observer on April 24, highlighting over 8,000 divorce petitions filed in the last two years, with more than 6,800 disposed of.

“When we step back and look at the children who are the products of those unions, we recognise that we’re having a discussion about divorces and spouses, but where are the children in that? We are talking about the economic stressors that parents have been exposed to because of the pandemic, but again, my question is ‘If parents are stressed, what is happening in those households in relation to the children?’ I could go on and on in relation to every single sector,” she said.

The same issue is extant within the education sector.

“Teachers are frustrated. Teachers feel overwhelmed… they are still playing catch up and are dealing with social issues in the classroom to the neglect sometimes of covering the contact hours when it comes on to curriculum development and delivery. And so again, if we have frustrated teachers with children who are coming from frustration in their home setting, what’s happening with the children?”

Gordon Harrison said 2030 has been marked as a critical year with a plan to achieve “certain minimum standards” across various sectors.

“My position is that we can’t achieve those if children are left behind. And so, we really have to go back to basics and consider not just the children in the margins, but the children we typically consider as being outside of the margins. A couple of discussions I had with them revealed that they are in fact very concerned about a number of issues.”

She also noted that children were victims of extreme forms of violence in the home. She pointed to the use of “extreme acts” of corporal punishment still being an issue, and continuous reports of individuals preying on children and subjecting them to sexual violence.

Also, she shared concerns about child-on-child violence within the schools, saying it has become almost a weekly occurrence since face-to-face classes resumed in January.

Gordon-Harrison said anxiety, aggression and depression are evident among many children.

“Mental health is an issue that is really at the top of the pile for me. We’re not talking about crazy kids, but we’re talking about issues that impact, and so, they are going to put the psychosocial and emotional imbalance in a very topsy-turvy manner.”

Ytske Van Winden, international child protection consultant with UNICEF, told the Sunday Observer that in many ways, the pandemic has created the “perfect storm.”

“Usually, it’s the teachers in schools and the guidance counsellors who pick up on cases of abuse, but they were not seeing the kids anymore. So, at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw the child abuse reports actually going down, but the cases were actually going up,” she said.

“It brings it back to the importance of family. Before the pandemic, eight out of 10 children in Jamaica between the ages of two to 14 were violently disciplined on a very regular basis. It starts at an early age in the home. If parents don’t have the strategies or the skills to teach children how to behave, they will punish. We are all about discipline but we’re against punishment. It’s different.”

Meanwhile, Blaine reiterated: “Most of our children are not homeless. Most of our children are not in children’s homes. Most of Jamaican children live in homes with their families. Child poverty is family poverty. A lot of the issues are about families. I have been doing this for almost 40 years in Jamaica. It’s heartbreaking to me that every single year we are here talking about this problem of children — and nobody can tell me that we can’t fix this problem.”