Protecting children

THE recent murders of eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky of Brooklyn, USA, and six-year-old Teonia Henry in Jamaica, serve as a grave reminder that children are not safe from vicious predators who will use the slightest opportunity presented to harm them.

Teonia was found earlier this month with stab wounds and a slashed throat off Mountain View Avenue in St Andrew, just two days after her parents reported her missing. She was reportedly left at home alone by a sibling who had been entrusted with her care after her mother went in search of a job. A frantic search by residents of her community resulted in the gruesome find.

Leiby vanished while on his first attempt to walk home from day camp. The youngster was granted the opportunity by his parents to make this journey alone and had even practised the route to his home in an Orthodox Jewish community. However, he got lost along the way and sought direction from 35-year-old Levi Aron, a former security guard.

When it became apparent that the child was missing, his community launched a search. The little boy’s severed feet were found in a Ziploc bag in Aron’s blood-spattered Brooklyn kitchen, while other body parts were found in a dumpster two miles away.

They’re two gruesome cases, and there have been countless other stories, including that of Ananda Dean, an 11-year-old who went missing in 2008 on her way from school, and was found murdered. The child had left the Swallowfield All-Age School on Whitehall Avenue, St Andrew, for her aunt’s house almost three miles away in Grants Pen. Several of her school books were found along a path in Pembroke Hall one day after she went missing.

Her case spurred the implementation of the Ananda Alert, a national response programme that makes information about missing children public.

In many of these cases, children are left to fend for themselves and then find themselves in danger. Yet even with rising cases of abuses against children, too many parents still shun common sense and place their children in dangerous situations. Very often children as young as three are sent to take public transportation alone or to walk home from school alone, or accompanied by other children too young to spot danger. And now, a month into the summer holidays, many kids are left home alone, while their parents work.

Convenor of children’s advocacy group Hear the Children Cry, Betty-Ann Blaine, believes that given what is happening in the society, parents need to be even more alert. The children’s advocate points out that children are especially vulnerable during the summer, since they are most often not under the supervision of an adult as they would be if they were in school.

“During the summer, the cases of missing children always increase. A lot of children are out on the streets during the summer, so the summer is a time when we need to be even more alert, because you have a lot of children out there and when you have more children out there, you have more people who are predators looking to hurt and harm our children,” Blaine said.

Between May to June of this year 252 children went missing and up to July, only 164 of them had returned home. Given the increasing number of children going missing, Blaine believes even adolescents should not be allowed to walk home alone.

“Your child is going to tell you that they want to come home alone; that is their nature and an adolescent should be able to walk home alone really, but not in today’s world,” she said.

“The consideration here is how far is that child walking home? In our society where there is so much violence against children, I would not recommend that any child walks home alone, even an adolescent. I would recommend that those children walk in groups, at least two or three of them, never at nights, never through lonely places, and if they can be accompanied by an adult, that’s the best advice,” she said.

She believes one way to solve the problem is for people to revert to the days when the community raised the child.

She also wants a national parents’ patrol programme which would see parents who are unemployed coming together in their own communities to designate responsible persons to walk children to bus stops, to school and to walk them back home.

And as parents plan summer activities, Blaine advises them to go in and meet the camp facilitators personally and quiz them about their safety practices, look where the kids will be sleeping and who they will be sleeping with among other things.

For those who cannot afford to send their children to camps or to hire a babysitter to watch them at home, she suggests a system which she finds has been very successful in other countries. She suggests that each of the parents in that community contribute a small fee that would go towards paying a sixth form or university student to look after the children. That way, the student will get a stipend to help them with their own back-to school preparations and the children would be supervised.