Workshop looks at resilience of kids
With reports of child abuse so prevalent in Belize you’d think that thousands of young Belizeans would be emotionally scarred for life. But children are often tougher than they look. Today a workshop in Belize City explored ways of building on those inner strengths to help kids beat the odds. News 5’s Janelle Chanona reports.
Judith Alpuche, Executive Director, N.C.F.C.
“Last year there were around five hundred plus, over five hundred and fifty cases reported to the family services division or the Department of Human Services in Belize City alone of various forms of abuse being committed or various allegations of abuse.”
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
According to Judith Alpuche, Executive Director of the National Committee for Families and Children, over the past four years, the reporting of child abuse cases has increased five fold. But more disturbingly, the experts estimate that number is just a tip of the iceberg.
Judith Alpuche
“People don’t report, people don’t want to have social services intervene in their families. Many times, the people who know of the abuse, particularly sexual abuse are parents or guardians. Many of the abusers or perpetrators of this abuse are family members and so things like that create barriers. Or people not necessarily wanting to get involved, like health professionals not always reporting because that sets in motion lots of things that might lead them having to testify in court et cetera; so there are multiple barriers.”
The increased caseload has challenged the small staff of social workers to provide quality care with stretched resources.
Judith Alpuche
“I know from my experience of when I was working at Human Services, that social workers would carry a caseload of sixty, when practiced wisdom tells you, you shouldn’t carry more than fifteen. So if you do the math, the sheer numbers tell you that the ability to take the kind of time with cases and so forth it is very limited. It is impacted by the sheer volume of work that you have to do.”
Until more social workers can be found, in an effort to combat the problem, this week N.C.F.C. and the University of Belize are arming the men and women on the frontline with skills to help children deal with traumatic situations. According to workshop facilitator Dr. Jean Lafrance, simple things like optimistic personalities and a sense of humour can help children cope with life.
Jean Lafrance, Faculty of Social Work, Univ. of Calgary
“One of the factors for me that is most critical that shows up in the research, is that if children have at least one person in their life that thinks they are really special, that thinks that somebody is crazy about them and essentially accepts them unconditionally, that will offset many risk factors.”
“Poverty is a huge factor, probably the biggest factor, but abuse, family violence, alcoholism, risky neighbourhoods. If you go through the list of what children can be subjected to, from that perspective it runs a gamut from what you have here with hurricanes, and communities being devastate to robbery, murder, wars, to things that happen everyday like children being hospitalized. And what the studies are showing is that the effects are very much the same, especially when children are very young. It’s not what’s intended that matters so much as what they actually receive, what it means for them.”
For the people who deal with young people everyday, the lesson learned here is that inner strengths and innate capabilities can enable Belize’s children to overcome any obstacle. Reporting for News 5, I am Janelle Chanona.
The approximately sixty participants of the Childhood Resiliency workshop included University of Belize faculty and students as well as representatives of governmental and non-governmental organisations. The conference ends on Friday afternoon.
