Women’s Centre Foundation Supporting Child Diversion Programme

The Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation (WCJF) is providing critical support to the National Child Diversion Programme.

This is in keeping with its mandate of facilitating the continued education of teen mothers as well as providing counselling to teen parents.

Speaking in a recent interview with JIS News, National Child Diversion Consultant, Ruth Carey, said that the WCJF has been working with the programme since its inception.

She noted that the Foundation was part of an earlier diversion initiative piloted in the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Court.

Ms. Carey explained that under that initiative, “children were diverted through the Director of Public Prosecution’s (DPP’s) office to the Women’s Centre and the Victims Services Division (VSD), if they committed an offence, where a child would have sex under the age of 16 years”.

She said with the development of the National Child Diversion Programme, the WCJF agreed to continue providing that support.

“The Foundation continues to offer treatment to the children that are diverted. So under the Child Diversion Act, they actually also accept boys into the programme, so it would have to be a child that would have committed a sexual offence or a diversion offence listed under the Sexual Offences Act. This is typically a child having sex under age 16, and sometimes they would take cases of incest,” she informed.

“They offer counselling, reproductive and sexual health education to the children in the programme. If the girl is pregnant, of course, that becomes part of their typical mandate and if the boy is a teen father, then they would offer further support outside of the education and counselling sessions,” Ms. Carey noted further.

The WCJF was established in 1978 in response to the high level of teenage pregnancy in Jamaica at that time.

Over the years, it has served approximately 46,000 teen mothers, many of whom have successfully completed their secondary education.

The Foundation offers a host of services through its main centres and outreach stations, including day-care facilities for babies of adolescent and working mothers, walk-in counselling service for women and men of all ages, as well as peer counselling training for in-school youth.