Victim Services Division Releases Animations To Tackle Youth Issues

The Justice Ministry’s Victim Services Division (VSD) has disseminated four of eight animations to tackle hard issues affecting youth in Jamaica.

The VSD has a mandate to provide counselling and emotional support to victims of crimes and their families.

Created for young people at the primary level (six to 12 years), the animations focus on eight topics, including Bullying, Conflict Resolution and Trusting the Justice System.

Director of the VSD, Osbourne Bailey, told JIS News that included in the population they support are children, who form a large part of the wider group of vulnerable persons because of their age and other factors.

“The idea to produce animation was born out of the knowledge that children do appreciate training in values and attitudes and a wide range of interpersonal complex skills. Animation has the capacity to convey complex ideas in a short time, with colours, pictures and movements that will appease children and can be used to address sensitive issues that children can understand and in turn internalise and be able to use, to take action,” Mr. Bailey said.

Other topics addressed include Sexual Assault: Good touch and bad touch, Abduction, Coping with Violence, Human Trafficking and Saying No to Gangs and Yes to the Police.

Mr. Bailey pointed out that topics were chosen based on research done by the Division on the children they help.

“We found that there are some issues that were current and relevant that children are grappling with, and oftentimes these are things that adults do not readily appreciate that children struggle with. So we came up with eight topics that we believed were relevant for Jamaica at the time and even ongoing,” he noted.

“Each animation is between two to three minutes long and because they are short, we expect that children will share it amongst themselves. The combination of pictures, sound, colours and music make it very entertaining to watch,” Mr. Bailey explained.

He said that four of the eight animations are done and will be disseminated through the Ministry of Justice website and social media platforms.

The animations were produced by the Ministry at a cost of $1.8 million from the Citizen Security and Justice Project (CSJP) III.

The VSD seeks to provide opportunity for healing and therapeutic intervention in order to assist the ministry to balance justice for victims of crime.

The critical complementary functions of the unit include emotional support through counselling and mediation, crisis intervention, special intervention Ppojects that target specific vulnerable groups and volunteer mobilisation.