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The Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, through the Ministry of National Mobilisation, Social Development, the Family, Gender and Youth Affairs, has launched a National Child Protection Policy in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).

The National Child Protection Policy was launched Tuesday in Kingstown and UNICEF’s Representative for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean Klin Sandi Lwin, hailed it as a major step forward.

Lwin described SVG as a trailblazer as it is the first country in the eastern Caribbean to adopt a national child protection policy.

The UNICEF representative added that the policy is consistent with the convention on the rights of the child and by its adoption, SVG is sending forth the message that everyone is expected to be actively involved in safeguarding the rights of children.

She also pledged UNICEF’s continued support in making the policy work in the best interest of the children of SVG.

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Delivering the keynote address at the launch, Minister of National Mobilisation, Frederick Stephenson, commended his government for the work it has been doing in relation to children, the elderly and the poor, noting that a society is judged by how it treats those vulnerable groups of people.

Stephenson pointed out that since 2010 with the passing of the Child Care and Adoption Act and subsequently in 2011, the Status of Children Act and the 2015 Domestic Violence Act, his government has demonstrated its commitment to the protection of its vulnerable citizens.

He said that the Child Protection Policy is a macro based legal and social protection strategy aimed at strengthening national protection systems, support social change, promote child protection, build evidence and knowledge, management and analyse agents of change.

(API)

3 replies on “St. Vincent launches national child protection policy”

  1. Launching a “Child Protection Policy” and actually protecting children are very two different things. SVG has long signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and has laws on its books to safeguard those rights. But that didn’t stop that lamentable situation reported in iWitness News some months ago, in which a 12 year old child who, it was reported, had been with a foster mother for some 10 years, who was then returned to the biological mother, where she became pregnant, allegedly by the mother’s boyfriend. Some people who commented on the case were quick to accuse the foster mother of “kidnapping” the child and even asserted that a child cannot be removed from its biological mother.
    I assume that the baby has been born since that story was reported, but I have heard nothing about DNA tests to establish the paternity of the baby, nor of any male charged with statutory rape of that 12 year old girl child. So we can have any number of UN Conventions, Laws and Protection Policies; but if they are not acted upon, indeed if our police and public are not even aware of the protections offered by those policies, then they are just so many pieces of paper that mean nothing.

  2. Good. Hopefully such policy also offer protection from the paedophiles that seem to be on a rampage in vincyland.

  3. Brown Boy USA says:

    We all know how it goes in SVG, let us stop trying to fool the world that we are trying to protect our children, especially our young girls. It’s a really sad state of affairs in SVG as far as this is concern. I remember that under James Mitchell’s NDP there was a law in which person will receive 10 years in prison for having sex with a minor. That law was enforced back then and a few persons were indeed sent to prison for breaking the law. Whatever happens to that law?

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