CPFSA CEO acknowledges progress but stresses urgency in finding missing children
LAURETTE ADAMS-THOMAS, CEO of the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), says the country is not yet at a place of comfort as it relates to the number of children found after they have been reported missing.
In 2023, some 1,027 children were reported missing through the 15-year-old Ananda Alert system. Of that number, 875 have since been located, one turned up dead, and 151 are still unaccounted for. A breakdown shows more girls (133) still missing than boys (18).
“I can proudly say that since its inception, hundreds of children have been returned home safely and we are very encouraged by that. However, we are not where we are supposed to be as many children are still missing without a trace,” Adams-Thomas told students at an Ananda Alert Youth Forum in Montego Bay, St James, on Thursday.
The Ananda Alert is an islandwide system, designed to ensure speedy and safe recovery of a child in the unfortunate event that he/she is missing or abducted. The system came on stream in 2009 to mobilise stakeholders and to get the message of a missing child into the public domain the moment the matter is reported to the police.
It was named after Ananda Dean, a child who was abducted and subsequently murdered in 2008.
Adams-Thomas noted that worldwide, the issue of missing children is a complex problem.
“From a parental perspective, when a child goes missing, minutes feel like hours, and hours feel like days, and so it is this in mind that we have to do our best – ourselves, our stakeholders – to ensure or to provide a level of reassurance that all efforts are being made to rapidly broaden the search for [missing children],” she explained.
Further, the CPFSA CEO said that while much work has been done to boost the efficiency of the Ananda Alert’s capacity to address missing children nationally with support from stakeholders, an equal level of intervention is now required to provide a greater level of assurance to parents whose children have gone missing.
“Despite our efforts, much more needs to be done as our children continue to still go missing and one child going missing is one child too many, hence the reasons for us being here today to look at solutions to address the ongoing problems from the perspective of our vibrant youth,” Adams-Thomas insisted.
“As we gather to discuss the missing children crisis in Jamaica, we hope that through the information that you will be sharing with us today, that information will assist us tremendously in formulating strategies to improve our response to this crisis,” she told the youth attending the forum.
She said that the Ananda Alert Youth Forum, the second edition of which was being staged in Montego Bay, is being held to generate new ideas to strengthen the operational system in preventing children from going missing and to quickly located those that do.
“This youth forum is a major step in the drive to stem this continuous problem as it provides new opportunities for improved undertaking, pertinent to the system’s success to curb the missing children phenomenon in our society,” Adams-Thomas said.