A long time children’s advocate is calling one of the key provisions contained in the draft Child Protection bill discriminatory and regressive, urging the government to bring the proposed legislation in line with United Nations conventions on the rights of the child.
The Ministry of Social Services and Community Development is leading public consultations on the bill, holding a series of town meetings all around the country to glean widespread input before the bill is presented to Parliament for debate.
However, Clever Duncombe of the organization Bahamian Fathers for Children Everywhere is taking issue with a key provision on parental responsibility. The provision states that every parent shall have parental responsibility for his child, but in the case of a child born out of wedlock, the father does not have parental responsibility unless he satisfies certain criteria.
Under the criteria set out for a child born outside the marital unit, a father is determined as the person who is deemed the putative father, whose name appears on the birth certificate or who has been making regular voluntary maintenance payments in compliance with an order of the court.
“Itﾒs discriminatory what they are suggesting when you are going to have two sets of laws; one for children who are born outside of the traditional family structure namely marriage and another set of laws for a child who is born outside of wedlock,” Mr. Duncombe complained.
“This is not a message that we ought to be sending if we are to indeed move our country forward. We believe that this discriminatory practice has proven to be damaging to our social fiber.”
He reasoned that when The Bahamas became a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child, it meant conforming with the article that states “parents have joint responsibility for raising the child and the state shall support them in this. The State shall provide appropriate assistance to parents in child raising.
As such, he urged legislative drafters to amend the Child Protection bill provision in line with the conventionﾒs articles.
“We have to start first with parental responsibility,” said Mr. Duncombe, “if we screw this first section [of the bill] up, if we donﾒt get this right, we would destroy all good intention of this proposed legislation.”
If enacted, the Child Protection Act would repeal a number of separate pieces of legislation; the Children and Young Persons Act, the Maintenance of Emigrants Act, the Guardianship and Custody of Infants Act, the Affiliation Proceedings Act and the Infants Relief Act. It would also result in changes to certain sections of the Penal Code and the Adoption of Childrenﾒs Act.
The Minister of Social Services and Community Development Melanie Griffin conceded that what the bill proposes challenges some of the traditionally held beliefs about child rearing and intervention practices.
Covered in the bill are a vast range of areas inclusive of child rights and protection, maintenance, juvenile courts, detention and the establishment of a national committee for families and children.
It is intended that the bill would collectively include certain provisions contained in laws already in existence and new ones.
For instance, officials are proposing raising the age of criminal responsibility from seven to ten, issuing supervision orders for children deemed uncontrollable rather than detaining them and extending the age for criminal detainees from 16 to 18.
“We need to be sending a strong and clear message that parents have joint primarily responsibility for raising their children and there are no shortcuts,” Mr. Duncombe said.
“This message is a timely one because it would require those who already have children and those who are thinking about having children [to do] a whole lot of sacrificing. I believe that only when we send this type of message to young men and women we would see a shift in terms of teenage pregnancies, uncontrollable children and the like.”
By: Tameka Lundy, The Bahama Journal
