KINGSTON, Jamaica—Director of children’s lobby group Hear The Children’s Cry (HTCC) Nigel Cooper, has declared Jamaica a “national threat” to its own children.

The University of Technology lecturer is calling for radical action to protect the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

Cooper made the call against the background of the suspected rape and brutal murder of 10-year-old Shani Coke in Trelawny earlier this week. The partially nude body of the Troy Primary School student was found with the throat slashed in Tyre district in the parish on Tuesday.

READ: UPDATE: Police identify child killed gruesomely in Trelawny

“We have become an ‘anti-child society’ in more ways than one. When it’s not rape or sexual assault, its murder or both – pretty much taking the innocence of our children and/or their lives,” said Cooper along with his fellow HTCC director/spokesperson, senior attorney-at-law Priscilla Duhaney.

“Our youngsters are at risk of violence at home, at risk in the public space and at risk in school,” they added.

According to Cooper, a career educator, “We need specific interventions for those issues within the physical residences; we must have another type of intervention for when children are in public spaces, and yet another, institution-related set, for when our youngsters are at school.”

Cooper said Jamaicans need to demand urgent and effective action from their Government.

“We need to come together as communities to protect our most vulnerable members, and our nation needs to draw strength and build protection for children, from our Christian foundations,” he said.

HTCC is again calling for the establishment of a Ministry of Family and Parenting to address the myriad problems facing children. It has also repeated its call for the Government to fund and otherwise support its proposed 10-year ‘Disrupt Poor Parenting Practice Project’.

HTCC is also calling for Jamaicans to be alert and to observe the actions of individuals around children.

“We are appealing to parents, community residents and society at large, to be more vigilant, especially during the long summer periods when our children are more exposed to violence and crime due to a lack of supervision, and the quest for more engagement,” said Duhaney.

She is urging the church to engage the children in their communities in summer programmes for their spiritual and social development.