Intervention network among recommendations from students to improve Ananda Alert – CPFSA

WESTERN BUREAU:

THE PROBLEM of children being abducted or going missing, and ending up dead could be eradicated should recommendations from secondary students for the improvement of the Ananda Alert System be adopted by the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA).

“They made a few suggestions, as it relates to prevention, and the areas that jumped out for me are centred around having more workshops and advertisements... The advertisements I believe are a good idea because you’ll find that the children are more drawn to what they can see and hear,” Laurette Adams-Thomas, chief executive officer at the CPFSA, said.

According to her, the recommendations from the students came out of a group discussion tasked with identifying various strategies or interventions that the CPFSA team could consider incorporating to improve the Ananda Alert System.

“With advertisements, you find that there is consistency, and once you hear something quite often, then you know it is something that the children can recall easily,” said Adams-Thomas at the end of the Western edition of the Ananda Alert System Youth Forum held late last week at the Meet Conference Centre in St. James.

“They mentioned jingles; as part of the advertisements, we could also ask the children to create jingles, so I believe those two suggestions on prevention are excellent ideas,” Adams-Thomas noted.

ROLE MODELS

The Ananda Alert System focuses on three main areas, covering prevention, recovery, intervention and counselling. It is a national system designed to ensure the speedy and safe recovery of a child in the unfortunate event that he or she is missing or abducted.

The system came on stream in 2009 to mobilise stakeholders and get the message of a missing child into the public domain once the matter has been reported to the police. It was named after Ananda Dean, a child who was abducted and subsequently murdered in 2008.

Regarding the recovery aspect of the programme, Adams-Thomas said several suggestions were made by the students, including creating a WhatsApp channel and pointed advertising on YouTube.

”All of these are good ideas that can be considered as a means of asking the public to identify children who have gone missing,” said the CPFSA CEO who also has portfolio responsibility for the Ananda Alert System.

“Another area that stood out for me had to do with an acronym that they coined called NIT – National Intervention Teams. And what they are recommending is for individuals and children who may have been victims of child abuse or abduction and who have now recovered fully and could function as role models for other children in childcare facilities,” Adams-Thomas explained.

She said the recommendation was presented as part of the intervention and counselling component of the Ananda Alert System.

“Even within general home settings where they can provide some sort of motivation to the children to prevent them from considering running away from home, or to be alert so they can avoid all the different signals and to prevent the possibility of them going missing,” she continued.

In 2023, some 1,027 children were reported missing through the 15-year-old Ananda Alert System, and from that number, 875 have since been returned, one was found dead, and 151 of the nation’s children are still missing without a trace.

A look at the breakdown showed that 841 females and 186 males were reported missing over the period; 708 females returned home, 167 males returned home, and one male died.