– Children Services Director
DIRECTOR of Children Services in the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security, Mrs. Ann Greene said gross parental neglect and dysfunctional families are major contributors to the increase in abandoned children.
In an interview with the Chronicle last week, she said, recently, various efforts have been made, including use of the media, to locate the parents of three children who are victims of parental neglect. According to her, there are too many cases of neglect and it is not due only to poverty, because many families, though poor, care their children through such circumstances.
She said there are instances where children were taken to the Drop In Centre, after being found wandering on the streets, as efforts are made to find their parents or guardians.
Greene said that is where the assessment process is started by case workers, who would then try to obtain enough information to determine the situation surrounding their abandonment.
She explained that, before a parent or guardian can be granted the parental privilege over such children, again, they will have to provide the agency with accurate facts to prove they are some relative of that child.
If granted parental privileges over a child, once more, they would have to stick with the agency’s regulations and have the children in a friendly and safe environment, pleasing to the agency’s impromptu visits or that child would return to the agency, Greene said.
She said the agency will not, readily, give back children to parents but will play a part in ensuring that the issue leading up to the dysfunction of the family is resolved before a child can return home.
Greene pointed out that parents hardly ever return for their children, probably due to their situation or lack of knowledge of where or how to find them.
She said, if children are not claimed, they will not only be kept in the care centre but placed in children’s homes or foster care or put up for adoption.
Greene said, though, that, from birth to the ages of five, children will be housed at Red Cross Convalescent Home in Georgetown and those abandoned without information about their names and ages are taken to a paediatrician for examination, to determine their approximate age.
She said that would help the agency provide a care plan for the child, as the agency tries to make life as normal as possible for children.
Greene said, because the first three years of a child’s life are the foundation years, there is a lot of learning to be done during that time and, if children are allowed to languish in institutions waiting for the parents to show up, they will be done an injustice.
She said child abuse affects children in many ways and a number of children are not aware that their parents are hurting them through neglect. Often the agency would find children locked away, unclothed, on the streets or left alone at home for days with nothing to eat.
“So we do everything we can to give them a normal life,” Greene assured.
She said, realising it is a real devastating and sad situation, is why her agency, even though costly, places advertisements in newspapers as a way of finding if not the parents, suitable homes for abandoned children.