MONTEGO BAY, St James — Hear the Children’s Cry is looking to ramp up its ‘Let’s Talk, Don’t Walk’ advocacy campaign, five years after the launch of the initiative dubbed the Runaway Prevention Programme, says founder Betty Ann Blaine.

“We intend to mount a very powerful social media campaign to tell children to talk to us before they make a move that can destroy their lives. We have to talk very straightforwardly for them to understand the dangers of running away,” Blaine told the sunday Observer.

Blaine, a children’s rights advocate, noted that Hear the Children’s Cry is continuing its push to have fewer children run away from home through the programme. According to her, the Runaway Prevention Programme was also designed to provide the parents and guardians of children who run away, with information and counselling on how to deal with the tumultuous situation.

“It is also to warn the children about the dangers of running away because sometimes they don’t even have a runaway plan. So, we tell them to talk to us because even though things may be bad at home — and I am not talking about sexual abuse because that is a different level of problem — when you run away you make yourself even more vulnerable,” she told the Sunday Observer.

She continued, “Missing children have been murdered in this country and we have had some who were raped. I remember working with one child who was gang raped years ago so we need to let the children know all of these things.”

Blaine also pinpointed the need to have more counselling sessions with parents on how to maintain happy and healthy homes for their children. She further pointed out that there was a need to tackle the deep-rooted issues that were forcing children to run away from their homes as she strongly believes “happy children do not run away”.

“When we look at the issue of children running away, we have to dig deeper and look at what exactly is happening at home. One of the big problems is this lack of communication between parents and their children. This issue of not communicating with your child is a culture thing, and when they become teenagers they tend to share their little secrets with their friends and not the parents,” Blaine explained.

Though the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic curtailed some of the outreach programmes that were planned for the initiative, the children’s rights advocate told the Sunday Observer that Hear the Children’s Cry has remained active.

“We have parent groups, and though everything got suspended because of COVID we still work with parents, and that is a big part of our work. One of the things we offer free of charge is counselling — not just for the child but also for the parents as well. We provide transportation for people coming to Kingston from some of the nearby parishes,” Blaine said.

Blaine stated that Hear the Children’s Cry has also partnered with other agencies to target children and parents living in the other sections of the island. She explained that while financial constraints have hampered the efforts of the children’s organisation to travel across all 14 parishes, there have been many attempts to maintain a presence through the use of these partnerships.

“This Runaway Prevention Programme also has a community-based initiative where we go into different communities. And we have been prioritising [this] because there are so many kids and we are a non-governmental organisation, so we do not have the money to physically go everywhere,” she said.

“The repeat runaways are prioritised because those are the children who may have very serious problems and need intervention. When these cases are brought to us by these parents, we go into these communities; and for the parishes that are far away, we continue to network with other agencies — whether it is with the Child Protection and Family Service Agency or a service club,” Blaine added.

Acknowledging that the parents or guardians of children who are habitual runaways may feel compelled to hand them over to the State, Blaine shared that she does not think this solves the issue.

“A lot of Jamaican parents, when the children get to this age and they exhibit this kind of behaviour and become chronic runaways, conclude that the children are uncontrollable and should be placed in homes. That is not the ideal thing, and before they even consider that they should look at what is happening at home to see if you can get to the root of the problem of why your child is leaving home,” she told the Sunday Observer.

Blaine argued that habitual runaways who are placed in State care also end up leaving.

“When you put your children in State care there are all kinds of other issues. Plus, a lot of the children who run away and end up in State care also run away from there as well. There is not a month we don’t get notified about children who run away from their homes. What is the point in putting them in homes when they are going to run away from these homes?” Blaine questioned.

“I strongly believe that a lot of these children who run away from home genuinely want to be with their parents. They just want better circumstances so a lot of these children in State care are very unhappy,” the children’s rights advocate added.

While she recognises that there is no one right way to tackle the issues surrounding runaway children, Blaine told the Sunday Observer that more campaigns are needed in schools. She suggested that traditional and new media platforms are also utilised to send messages out.

“We need that because we need the children to know the dangers of unprotected sex and casual sex (just having sex with anybody). That should be a big part of the curriculum; we have had children who go missing and come back pregnant,” she said.