After revealing statistics showing that more than half of sex assault referrals involve children, the Cayman Islands Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub says the stark figures graphically underline the need for greater awareness, early intervention and coordinated community action.
Royal Cayman Islands Police Service Chief Inspector Lorraine Roberts, a former officer in London’s Metropolitan Police and a child protection specialist, said it was “a huge concern”.
She added, “What we know, sadly, is that some children are being targeted for sex or to be joining gangs because they are vulnerable themselves. They are vulnerable children to start with and they are being drawn into child exploitation.
“Now child exploitation is a power balance, it’s a power control, where adults, some adults, are then taking advantage of that power imbalance and involving these children into gang’s lives.”
But she said that some children were often unaware that they were being exploited and felt that gangs offered “affection” and “meeting people”, although they were in reality being coerced and left vulnerable to becoming victims of further crime.
Roberts said the main focus was targeting perpetrators and appealed for the public to contact police if they “know of these people, know of these gangs”.
Repeat victims
She also highlighted that statistics showed that children were often repeat victims of sex abuse and that the key to ending the problem was to take a holistic approach to combatting it.
More than 2,700 child safeguarding referrals were made to MASH last year, with about 1,300 of them domestic referrals and almost 300 multi-agency child investigations, Compass TV’s Spotlight programme, hosted by Tammi Sulliman, heard this week.
Referrals have increased by 25% in the past year and went up 75% the year before.
But Roberts said the increases reflected more public willingness to report safeguarding concerns to police.
She added, “What is obviously a concern is what is actually occurring in those children’s lives … the majority of the crimes or those incidences are single agency that have mainly been dealt with by the Department of Child and Family Services.
“So, it’s really good that our schools, who are main contributors to spotting signs of child abuse, are the ones that are reporting that to us. So, that’s a good thing, because once they have reported, we can then look at what is occurring in that family, what is occurring in that child’s life.
“The worrying thing is that the crimes are high, that children are being exploited for a number of different reasons, and it’s early intervention, partnership working to prevent that happening.”
Increase in missing children
Roberts said Commissioner of Police Kurt Walton had noticed an increase in the number of children going missing from home or from residential care centres.
She added that the “Philomena Protocol”, pioneered in the UK, which creates a profile of children, including descriptions, regular haunts and other information, which could be used to speed tracing if a child did abscond, had been adopted in Cayman.
Roberts said, “The majority of children who go missing, sadly, are children that are already known to children’s services or DCFS and are already in our care homes because they have had traumatic lives.”
She added that the protocol looked at “the causes of the causes” – why children went missing, where they went missing from, and who were “the perpetrators who were causing these children harm” – and helped cut the incidences of children who absconded.
“Safeguarding, we have got to look at the child’s behaviour,” Roberts said. “It’s really important that we understand when a child is misbehaving, for example, what’s going on that child’s life?”
She said warning signs of gang involvement for older children were expensive items, like new sneakers they could not have bought themselves, extra money or staying out all night without a proper explanation.
She added that online abuse was also a major problem, with exploited youngsters often approached on services like Snapchat or Instagram. She said parents should be aware of their children’s online activity.
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