Children Beyond the Legal Boundaries

There is more than one reason to feel uncomfortable and emotionally queasy about some matters discussed at last Friday’s hearing of the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights, Equality and Diversity with special focus on the question of child labour.

Numerous unpleasant memories, old and new, returned to heighten my discomfort over the framing of official positions expressed, albeit out of undeniable concern by state functionaries. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing but good intentions on show at the hearing.

Our own front-page headline on Saturday however flagged the possibility of a ‘Crackdown on Child Beggars’ while the substantive story was titled ‘TTPS Going After Child Beggars.’

Eight years ago, a collaboration involving several institutions including the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM), UNICEF, and the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) produced Our Children, Our Media: A Guide for Caribbean Media Practitioners.

I was part of the team, supervised by Steve Maximay, that worked on the publication whose main contributor was Barbadian journalist, Julius Gittens. It was the product of a series of regional journalism workshops and extensive research. The major thrust of the “guide” was to bring journalistic meaning and expression to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I had by then long been influenced, as a parent and journalist, by such a mandate. In 2007, for example, in an effort led by then UNIC National Information Officer in T&T, Elizabeth Solomon (now Caricom Assistant Secretary General, Foreign and Community Relations) we looked at media coverage guided by such rights.

Literature from that event left lying around at my home one day led to an accusation by my son Mikhail (then a minor) that his parents were depriving him of the right to hold opinions of his own! Almost every single friend and associate of mine has heard that story.

Later, in 2014, I covered the ILO’s Regional Initiative: Latin America and the Caribbean Free of Child Labour which produced a ‘Brasilia Declaration’ aimed at eliminating “the worst forms of child labour” by 2016 and all forms by the year 2020.

Our then Labour Minister, Errol McLeod, described child labour as “a sin” after affixing his signature to the Declaration in the Brazilian capital.

That proceedings from that very event helped nuance the discussion when President Lula da Silva (now back in the saddle) described his early life as a child vendor and, in the process, inserted the dilemma of economic necessity versus the strict application of law.

Last Friday, Opposition Senator Jearlean John, relayed a similar message when she spoke of her childhood days in Charlotteville selling fish and vegetables and the existence of what she described as a “cultural shift.” It was a singularly important intervention.

One of the key lessons I have learned along the way (two of my close childhood friends were grossly underpaid “apprentice” mechanics at 15 and 16 earning $2.50 - $5.00 a week), was that this issue of child labour requires broad social dialogue based on an understanding of much more than what the law permits or prohibits.

Supt Claire Guy-Alleyne’s professional brief and her quoted remarks last Friday touched on this, but insufficiently to exhibit what I consider to be her sensitivity to the numerous complexities.

As a well-informed presenter at more than one regional media training exercise, it was clear that the TTPS, through Guy-Alleyne and her team, has within its community a valuable resource to add the humanitarian dynamic to application of law.

But such is the nature of policing here, it was well beyond her brief to remind the JSC and this country that observance of the rights of the child constitutes a vital element of social, cultural, and economic rights.

Under such conditions of denial, our bungling of migrant rights has imposed an additional dimension we need to negotiate with greater care.

Denial of the right of migrant children to an education over a protracted period, followed by forceful application of criminal law to address its outcome, constitutes a brutal knee to the neck.

It is also similarly injurious that after almost one decade of the Brasilia photo-op, five years after the establishment of a National Steering Committee for the Prevention and Elimination of Child Labour, and the existence of “multiple programmes”, almost nothing has happened and the absence of data is being cited in defence of gross official negligence on this matter.

People, we are not getting our priorities right!