‘We cannot do it alone’

WESTERN BUREAU:

Sergeant Leon Golding, a member of the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s [JCF] Community Safety and Security Unit, is asking citizens to be more proactive in assisting the police to ensure the safety of children in their communities, as well as the successful management of the police’s various youth intervention programmes.

Golding made the appeal during a webinar held by the Child Protection and Family Services Agency [CPFSA] on Monday night, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Ananda Alert missing children monitoring system. The system was named after 11-year-old Ananda Dean, who was raped and murdered in September 2008.

During the meeting, it was disclosed that 1,011 children were reported missing during 2024, of which 899 have since returned home.

“It is the Webster’s Dictionary that gives ‘community’ to mean ‘a group of people who share a common interest or location, often with a sense of belonging and interaction’. In this case, the interest would be the safety of the nation’s children,” Golding told the webinar.

“As it relates to the JCF, we understand the role that we play in ensuring that these activities are carried out, but we ask that the citizens of the country buy into the idea that we cannot do it alone,” continued Golding. “We need your help in becoming a member of the neighbourhood watch, ensuring that your children become members of the police youth club movement, and assisting in the mentoring of the youth of today. We believe that, if we can get those three pillars to work, we would have an effective way in which we protect our children on a day-to-day basis.”

Golding further outlined how residents can help parents to monitor their children’s whereabouts, to ensure their safety.

“The neighbourhood watch movement looks at the community in its entirety and it goes back as far as taking a village to raise a child. With each community member looking out, they can identify the students who you, as the parent, may leave behind to go to work in the morning, expecting the child to leave after you to catch the bus to go to school. But they see that that child is at home at 8 a.m., knowing the child is normally out by 7:30 a.m.,” said Golding.

“That can raise a red flag and cause you to get an alert from that resident who observed it, causing you to be aware of where your child is and looking at the possible reasons why this child did not leave out as they ought to have done to go to school. Hence, you will now be able to curtail or fix the problem that exists,” Golding added. “Also, what it does is to identify strangers within the community who may be visiting your home or visiting that child at your home.”

Other programmes that the JCF is currently using as part of its strategy to protect children include the Safe Schools Programme, which has 291 trained school resource officers installed at 154 participating schools islandwide for mentorship of students.

Meanwhile, CPFSA Ananda Alert Officer Annadjae Roberts told the meeting that, when a child who is reported missing returns home, the CPFSA launches follow-up investigations to identify any existing issues at play, especially if the child was a runaway.

“When children return home, our primary goal is to try and make contact with that particular family to see what the situation was, and we will make referrals for intervention. At times, that intervention may be done internally by our Children and Family Support Unit, or we may have to refer externally to the Victim Services Division or any of our other partners,” said Roberts. “A part of the follow-up intervention that we do starts with an investigation, and this has to include conversations with the child, checks at school to see what was happening, and checks with other community members, so we can have insight as to what was happening or possibly still happening.”