United Nations Child Rights Expert Faith Marshall-Harris is concerned that there are not many calls coming to the Faith Marshall-Harris Sandy Lane Charitable Trust Helpline.
Speaking during a meeting among several social workers recently, she pointed out that the majority of the calls came to her personal phone directly – something she did not have an issue with as she said she was more than willing to help.
She highlighted a number of reasons she believed was the cause for this, such as individuals reaching a stage at which they want an intervention at a very high level or they think they have exhausted every other avenue and want intervention with the authorities to get them to move in some way.
On average she received about two to three calls per day within a month, with the majority of the calls coming from concerned adults like aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, godparents and grandparents.
However, Marshall-Harris noted that calls never came directly from children and believed it was because they did not have the means to reach out, they were not informed about the hotline and they were not socialised to speak out about themselves.
“There’s a larger societal problem why children don’t reach out to us and that is something that is within my line as a child rights [expert] that I look at regionally and locally where our Barbadian children are not socialised to speak out on their own behalf. They speak among themselves, but we have not brought them up to say ‘this is what is happening to me’,” she said.
In an effort to provide the appropriate means for children to be informed of the helpline and reach out, Marshall-Harris is planning to reactivate the hotline’s social media accounts.
“We have battled with this problem of how to make the helpline known to as many children as possible. The children themselves are not using the mediums I have used in the past to publicise the helpline. We know that to get to them where they are is to go on social media and so I want to reactivate the social media platforms,” she said.
Primary reports being made include disputes among couples over access to a child, bullying among students and between teachers and students and health challenges where a child is not receiving adequate health care or medical attention and may need to be moved to a safer environment.
Marshall-Harris outlined a number of intervention methods she utilised in the past – like liaising directly with authorities to develop an action plan in certain scenarios, delivering food hampers during the COVID-19 pandemic and operating a back-to-school programme with the help of some social workers.
She said plans for the future include wider social media outreach and hoped through discussions with the ministry to implement a free phone system, where in case a call is made to issue a report it would not be charged to that phone line. (AJ)
