Joel Julien

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says the ap­par­ent cur­rent up­surge in sex crimes against chil­dren and young girls in par­tic­u­lar is hor­ren­dous.

How­ev­er, he says the num­ber of cas­es be­ing re­port­ed to the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice is as a re­sult of the sys­tems that are be­ing put in place to help pro­tect vic­tims.

In the past sev­en days, 11 cas­es of sex­u­al as­sault against mi­nors have been heard in the lo­cal courts.

On Mon­day, five men ap­peared be­fore courts in Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do re­spec­tive­ly, to an­swer to var­i­ous such charges and yes­ter­day, two more ap­peared.

Row­ley was asked about this sit­u­a­tion dur­ing an in­ter­view on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew with Na­talee Legore yes­ter­day.

“I think it is the lev­el of ac­tiv­i­ty that ex­ists now and the sys­tems that are in place now that brings out some of these things in the way that they are com­ing out. A lot of it was hap­pen­ing be­fore,” Row­ley said.

How­ev­er, the PM de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “hor­ren­dous.”

“I think what you are see­ing here is that some of the sys­tems are work­ing and wrin­kling out and iden­ti­fy­ing,” he said.

With re­spect to the on­go­ing na­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion about ed­u­ca­tion re­form, Row­ley said there has been a lot of talk about get­ting rid of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am­i­na­tion but said so far, he has not heard a suit­able re­place­ment for it.

“I have not heard yet what is the re­place­ment, be­cause there has to be some process by which you move chil­dren from the pri­ma­ry schools to the sec­ondary schools,” he said.

Row­ley said Gov­ern­ment cur­rent­ly is look­ing at find­ing us­able op­tions to ad­dress the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

He al­so de­fend­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of the schol­ar­ship pro­gramme, where schol­ar­ships avail­able were cut from 400 to 100.

“One hun­dred will get the schol­ar­ship as you know it and 400 who will be sup­port­ed sep­a­rate­ly on a means test, so at the end of the year 500 will be helped against 400 by us­ing that new sys­tem,” he said.