Latest update April 17th, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 22, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Guyana has a shockingly high rate of child institutionalization. One in every 1,000 children in Guyana is in an institution.
That ratio does not account for the hundreds more who are potential candidates for penal institutions. There are many young men walking around this country with guns in their waist and joints of marijuana between their lips, committing crimes, including robberies and murder for which they have not yet been brought to account by the law.
The extremely high rate of institutionalization of children is a ticking time bomb. It will explode in our faces because our institutions are not geared, or do not have the resources to be able to sufficiently rehabilitate, or fully integrate children back into society.
A child, who has been institutionalized, even as an orphan, carries a stigma in the wider society. That child is considered as either a deviant or a dependent. That stigma is a permanent brand on that child, marking him or her off as different from others and therefore attracting a different fate.
That so many of our children are institutionalized represents a huge failure on the part of society. But this failure is not as great as that of the institutions to which they are consigned. These institutions have failed our children. They have failed them because they have failed to help them in the way that they should be helped.
Many of these institutions do a good job of feeding, clothing and providing shelter for children. They do a good job also of keeping them healthy. But the children, once institutionalized, often are not placed in foster homes or reintegrated back into their families.
Some institutions like those responsible for juvenile delinquency are no different from prisons. There have been reports of abuse at these institutions, sexual and emotional abuse. The penal institutions for juveniles are the biggest failures. They are prisons.
Ironically, the most of these institutions to which our children are consigned are too preoccupied with the welfare of the children when in fact they should be more concerned with the well-being of the families from which these children come. Greater attention should be paid to the families so that the children can be reintegrated into them rather than having to spend their days and nights huddled together with other children in an institution.
These institutions mean well but they also have a vested interest in ensuring that the children are kept there rather than being reunited with their families or assigned to foster families. Without children to fill their dormitories, these institutions would lose their purpose. They were formed to institutionalize children.
To empty their halls of these children would put them out of commission and more importantly dry up the sources of funding that they receive.
Yet if these institutions want a permanent solution to child delinquency, neglect and abandonment, the central focus has to be not on providing for these children but in helping to reintegrate them into their families or finding foster homes for them. The foster home should not be an institution. It has to be a family, a stable family.
There are many children who are in orphanages who are not orphans. These children are institutionalized because their parents either do not want them or cannot afford to take care of them. These children must suffer immensely. They know they have parents at home. Yet each night they are forced to sleep outside of their homes in an institution.
The institutions should be working to help these parents to keep these children at home. It would cost them far less to help the parents to keep the children than to institutionalize them.
A change in direction is needed in the way we treat our children who are institutionalized. Instead of pumping more money into their upkeep, instead of building larger homes and juvenile facilities, greater attention should be paid to helping these children to have a normal life with their families or with foster parents.
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