Shir­van Williams

Hun­dreds of chil­dren in T&T face the harsh re­al­i­ty of hav­ing nowhere to call home or no loved one to give them prop­er care and at­ten­tion. Many of these chil­dren have been abused or aban­doned. Some are giv­en a chance at life at the var­i­ous chil­dren's homes through­out the coun­try but some­times even this set­ting may not be con­ducive to their men­tal and phys­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty. It is the hope of the Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty that a well thought out and ef­fec­tive fos­ter care sys­tem will soon change this.

The staff of the Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty is hope­ful that be­fore the end of Feb­ru­ary, the au­thor­i­ty will be ful­ly func­tion­al and that the Chil­dren's Act will be pro­claimed in par­lia­ment.

Last De­cem­ber, it put ad­ver­tise­ments in var­i­ous news­pa­pers look­ing for peo­ple who may be in­ter­est­ed in the new fos­ter care sys­tem. More than ten peo­ple have al­ready re­spond­ed. The ex­ist­ing fos­ter care sys­tem was cre­at­ed as a pi­lot project, about two decades ago, and has nev­er been of­fi­cial­ly com­mis­sioned to this day.

"We haven't re­al­ly had a prop­er fos­ter care sys­tem in Trinidad so the rea­son you haven't heard much about it is that it re­al­ly in a le­gal sense didn't ex­ist," said Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty chair­man Stephanie Daly, as she spoke with the T&T Guardian at the au­thor­i­ty's head of­fice on Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain. "What we had was a pi­lot project which I think was in­for­mal for quite a long time. It was per­haps for­malised a bit more in 1995. It was a fair­ly closed project, it wasn't some­thing which was look­ing to ex­pand or to pro­vide greater op­tions and re­sources for peo­ple who had to place chil­dren. It wasn't un­til this leg­is­la­tion, the Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty leg­is­la­tion that it be­came a leg­isla­tive im­per­a­tive and it is one of our re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to set up and man­age that sort of sys­tem."

It should be not­ed that there is a ma­jor dif­fer­ence be­tween be­com­ing a fos­ter par­ent and adopt­ing a child as adop­tion is for­ev­er and is the com­plete re­place­ment of a par­ent, while fos­ter care usu­al­ly comes in­to play when the state has to place chil­dren be­cause they don't have a fam­i­ly mem­ber who can take prop­er care of them and on­ly ex­tends to age of 17, she ex­plained.

There are usu­al­ly two op­tions when it comes to plac­ing a child, one is find­ing a place at a com­mu­ni­ty res­i­dence and the oth­er is plac­ing chil­dren with in­di­vid­ual fam­i­lies. Based on the two avail­able op­tions Daly be­lieves it would be bet­ter if chil­dren are placed in a fam­i­ly en­vi­ron­ment.

The fos­ter care sys­tem will of­fer this along with a lot more flex­i­bil­i­ty than com­mu­ni­ty res­i­dences be­cause any fam­i­ly that a child is placed with will usu­al­ly be very fo­cused on that par­tic­u­lar child and that par­tic­u­lar child's needs and abil­i­ties, she con­tin­ued.

She said: "I think it's pret­ty gen­er­al­ly ac­cept­ed that be­ing placed in a fam­i­ly en­vi­ron­ment has a bet­ter po­ten­tial for suc­cess for the child than as op­posed to in­sti­tu­tion­al care. It's a much less ex­pen­sive op­tion be­cause the in­sti­tu­tion­al care is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly ex­pen­sive and that's not just our ex­pe­ri­ence but a world­wide ex­pe­ri­ence."

Di­rec­tor of the au­thor­i­ty, Shar­i­fa Ali-Ab­dul­lah added: "We are go­ing to go out again and in fact do much more in terms of pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion be­cause the pi­lot sys­tem has re­al­ly been a well kept se­cret. A lot of peo­ple do not know about the pi­lot sys­tem. We need to ed­u­cate about fos­ter care. The fos­ter care sys­tem would al­so be much quick­er for plac­ing chil­dren than try­ing to de­vel­op ad­di­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty res­i­dences and try­ing to staff them."

They are look­ing to build a data­base of at least 25 in­ter­est­ed care-givers to add to a reg­istry, Ali-Ab­dul­lah con­tin­ued. An­oth­er ma­jor chal­lenge that they are fac­ing right now, be­side the pass­ing of the leg­is­la­tion, is de­ter­min­ing what type of stipend should be of­fered.

He added: "We have to de­ter­mine the quan­tum. At present the providers re­ceive be­tween $1,500- $5,000 per month, per child. The $5,000 would re­fer to spe­cial chil­dren with spe­cial needs. We are look­ing at all the bud­get re­vi­sions to see what would be the al­lo­ca­tion for fos­ter care, to see what would be a rea­son­able stipend to pay to par­ents. We have ac­tu­al­ly con­duct­ed quite a bit of re­search in­to best prac­tice and there are some ju­ris­dic­tions where some peo­ple do not re­ceive a stipend and oth­er places where they do."

The chal­lenge lies in mak­ing sure that what­ev­er stipend is agreed on is an ap­pro­pri­ate amount. One of the bench­marks be­ing used so far is the cost of keep­ing a child in a chil­dren's home as com­pared to fos­ter care. For in­stance, at the four ful­ly sub­sidised homes, or even the Youth Train­ing Cen­tre, it cost ap­prox­i­mate­ly $10,000 per month to pro­vide for a child, Ali-Ab­dul­lah re­vealed. She be­lieves, based on the sev­er­al stud­ies that have been con­duct­ed so far by the au­thor­i­ty, that it would be much cheap­er to care for a child stay­ing with fos­ter par­ents.

Al­so, fos­ter care would have the added ben­e­fit of be­ing able to help even more dis­placed chil­dren from the more re­mote ar­eas of the coun­try. This would be a great im­prove­ment be­cause of the 50 chil­dren's homes in T&T; there are none in the south east area. In fact, there are on­ly three chil­dren's homes in the whole east­ern area from To­co all the way down to Moru­ga.

Daly chimed in: "Be­cause it is new we will be eval­u­at­ing as we go. Lo­ca­tion will be a fac­tor when se­lect­ing a place­ment for a child. If they are in school you want them to con­tin­ue with their school­ing with­out dis­lo­ca­tion. The au­thor­i­ty is not just sit­ting and wait­ing for leg­is­la­tion to pass and we have al­ready be­gun to ed­u­cate key stake­hold­ers on how the new sys­tem will work."

Ali-Ab­dul­lah echoed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments and added that it was im­per­a­tive that all the peo­ple who would be af­fect­ed by the new fos­ter care sys­tem ful­ly un­der­stand how it works for it to be ful­ly ef­fec­tive.

She said: "We don't want to wait un­til we pro­claim and then do all of this be­cause there must be tran­si­tion, so we are go­ing to be­gin as­sess­ing the chil­dren cur­rent­ly in fos­ter care at our ser­vice cen­tre where we have our so­cial work­ers, doc­tors and psy­chol­o­gists al­ready in place."

A lot of care will be tak­en to en­sure that chil­dren are not hurt even more through the new sys­tem and there will be sev­er­al dif­fer­ent mon­i­tor­ing tools for those who are se­lect­ed. A li­cens­ing and mon­i­tor­ing de­part­ment will be set up and will use var­i­ous mon­i­tor­ing tools like unan­nounced calls, vis­its at nights and on the week­ends. These sur­prise vis­its could be con­duct­ed at least twice a month.

One of the ma­jor changes that the au­thor­i­ty is look­ing for­ward to is the move away from the dor­mi­to­ry type fa­cil­i­ties so that there can be an in­tro­duc­tion of small­er group homes which will help cre­ate more love and at­ten­tion for a dis­placed child.

There is no in­ten­tion to in­tro­duce the sys­tem and not en­sure that it gives all the ben­e­fits that a child needs as well as the cor­rect sup­port to fos­ter par­ents, Daly said.

"We are look­ing at pro­vid­ing on­go­ing sup­port whether it is a helpline or train­ing for par­ents dur­ing the time that they would be fos­ter­ing chil­dren or pe­ri­od­ic ses­sions to re­al­ly pro­vide that type of sup­port."

Al­so present at the in­ter­view was Christalle Gemon the act­ing deputy di­rec­tor of Care, Le­gal and Reg­u­la­to­ry Ser­vices who as­sured that en­tire fos­ter care sys­tem would be based on a care­ful­ly pre­pared guide.

The as­sess­ment is very sci­en­tif­ic be­cause they have de­vel­oped as­sess­ment tools which takes in­to con­sid­er­a­tion the his­to­ry and the back­ground of the ap­pli­cant. The as­sess­ment tools are aimed at de­ter­min­ing how ef­fec­tive a per­son would be as a fos­ter care provider.

In the lead up to the pro­gramme, there will be rig­or­ous train­ing of staff which in­cludes look­ing at re­al life cas­es, she said.

Strate­gies have been de­vel­oped which will help ad­dress the reg­u­lar­ly oc­cur­ring prob­lems that are usu­al­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with fos­ter care around the world. In the event that all the pro­to­col is fol­lowed and there is still a break­down in the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the child and the fos­ter par­ent, there are mech­a­nisms in place to en­sure an easy tran­si­tion for both par­ties in­volved said act­ing Team Lead of Fos­ter Care, An­juli Tewari.

"Built in to the sys­tem we would take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion place­ment break­down be­cause it is very like­ly that some­times chil­dren will act out, there­fore we do have mech­a­nisms in place to of­fer sup­port, to do me­di­a­tion, to even maybe have a sys­tem like a time­out. Our first ini­tia­tive would be to sup­port the re­la­tion­ship not to have that child re­moved. We do have sys­tems in place to ad­dress place­ment break­down."

She ad­mit­ted though that if at the end of the day a re­la­tion­ship is deemed un­fix­able there is a pro­ce­dure in place to re­view the case and try a bet­ter place­ment op­tion.

HOW THE SYS­TEM WILL WORK

Christal Chap­man, Se­nior Le­gal As­so­ciate with the Chil­dren's Au­thor­i­ty, broke down how the en­tire sys­tem would work, from ap­pli­ca­tion to se­lec­tion.

The ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est will be pub­lished, and a more de­tailed pack­age will be for­ward­ed to re­spon­der. This pack­age would con­tain an ap­pli­ca­tion form and oth­er doc­u­men­ta­tion that high­lights the roles and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of a fos­ter par­ent.

The per­son then has to sub­mit a med­ical cer­tifi­cate at­test­ing to their phys­i­cal and men­tal well be­ing. This can be ob­tained from a pri­vate doc­tor. They then have to sub­mit a po­lice cer­tifi­cate of good char­ac­ter which would have been ob­tained with­in the last six months pre­ced­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion.

The per­son will then have to sub­mit the con­tact in­for­ma­tion for two ref­er­ences and al­so pho­to iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Once the com­plet­ed ap­pli­ca­tion form and all the oth­er re­quired doc­u­ments are sub­mit­ted, the in­for­ma­tion is then ver­i­fied and the process be­gins by open­ing a file for that ap­pli­cant and start­ing the ini­tial stages.

The first stage of the screen­ing would be a home vis­it to as­sess the suit­abil­i­ty of not just the ap­pli­cant but the ap­pli­cant's home. As part of that screen­ing process both the ap­pli­cant and their fam­i­ly mem­bers as well as the home, the premis­es and the en­vi­ron­ment will be re­viewed.

The ap­pli­cant has to be able to pro­vide for the health, ed­u­ca­tion and the gen­er­al wel­fare needs of the child. Once the ini­tial screen­ing is done at the home, a more in depth in­ter­view is con­duct­ed with the ap­pli­cant.

Back­ground checks on mem­bers of the house­hold out­side of the ap­pli­cant are al­so part of the process which means any adult liv­ing in the house­hold or any­body in a vis­it­ing re­la­tion­ship and any reg­u­lar vis­i­tors who do not live at the home will be in­ves­ti­gat­ed.

The au­thor­i­ty re­ceives re­ports at each stage of as­sess­ment. A fi­nal re­port is then com­plet­ed and sub­mit­ted to the board for their ap­proval. The board will then come to a de­ci­sion.

If the ap­pli­cant is ac­cept­ed they will be added to an ap­proved reg­is­ter of fos­ter par­ents. The per­son is then trained by the au­thor­i­ty.

The train­ing will be used to high­light par­ent­ing skills, be­hav­ioral needs of chil­dren and child de­vel­op­ment is­sues. Those who are un­der­tak­ing spe­cial­ist roles with chil­dren with cer­tain spe­cial­ist needs may re­ceive more in-depth train­ing.

Once the per­son is placed on the reg­is­ter, they can be added to the list of ap­proved par­ents that can now be matched with a po­ten­tial child in need.

Things like prox­im­i­ty to school­ing, cul­tur­al and re­li­gious back­ground of the fos­ter car­er are al­so tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion be­cause the au­thor­i­ty will try as much as pos­si­ble to have a child re­main in the same back­ground that they are fa­mil­iar with as much as pos­si­ble.