SPURRED to action by an increase in violent confrontations among students, Fi We Children Foundation (FWCF) has taken its Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) initiative into high schools, seeking to equip youth with the skills to de-escalate and solve disputes peacefully.

In the latest incident, a 17-year-old schoolboy was arrested after he reportedly fatally stabbed another student during a dispute in Manchester on Monday.

“We have had many issues…where students, both in Kingston and in rural Jamaica, have been having violent encounters with each other. Children stabbing each other, beating up each other,” said Jordaina Denton, member of FWCF’s youth policy committee, as she spoke at a Jamaica Observer Press Club meeting at the newspaper’s main building in St Andrew recently.

“So, in light of those incidents, we decided at the foundation that we would have a project where we actively go into these high schools and educate and sensitise students on alternative methods to deal with their issues with each other, in an effort to have these children resort to non-violent means of settling disputes as a whole,” she explained.

Denton said that the foundation has been monitoring the uptick in violent altercations in schools and is working to educate as many children as possible on peacefully defusing disagreements.

Adding to the conversation fellow FWCF youth policy committee member Darrell Scott told Observer editors and reporters that the foundation’s ADR outreach has so far reached between 10 and 15 schools, working alongside guidance counsellors to reinforce conflict-resolution efforts already in place.

Scott noted that through feedback from schools and young members within the student population, FWCF is able to track whether students are applying what they have learnt when disagreements arise.

“Report writing is one way that we measure our success, and also following up to understand if there has been a decrease. For instance, with ADR, of course, we can’t measure the wider violence in Jamaica to say that there has been a decrease. But one of the things — and why the general membership exists — is raising young leaders, who then become youth leaders in their spaces,” said Scott as he pointed that most of FWCF’s general members are still in high school.

“They can come back to us and say, ‘Hey, since these people have been more sensitised, they have become more careful about how they go about [conflicts]’. Also, when you talk about ADR, some of these things guidance counsellors have been trying to implement or have already implemented. So having that kind of partnership and just having dialogue to see how the progress has gone, since we have been there, is one of the ways that we track,” explained Scott.

The ADR initiative forms part of the foundation’s wider, project-based approach to advocating for children’s rights, which has included pushing for a school nutrition policy.

The foundation has teamed up with UNICEF Jamaica, the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network, and BiteBack 2030 to launch the “Fix My Food Jamaica” campaign aimed at tackling sky-rocketing rates of childhood obesity and non-communicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension across the island.

The initiative calls for the introduction of front-of-package warning labels following evidence from a recent study carried out in Jamaica by the Ministry of Health and Wellness, University of Technology, Jamaica, and Pan American Health Organization across nine parishes, which concluded that the black octagonal warning labels were more effective in helping consumers to readily recognise less healthy products.

Scott commended the Government for its commitment to the National School Nutrition Policy, adding that he hopes for more initiatives that prioritises food safety in schools.

As for future projects, Scott says the organisation is also building partnerships for planned initiatives to support children living with HIV.

“And right now, where we stand is building partnerships in different youth spaces and doing things like this to get the word out,” said Scott.

“The work that we currently do is working in tandem with Government and civil society to make sure that these rights are protected. And things that we want to do going forward is continuing the work in schools and in community,” added Scott.