Making an impact on child abuse
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:28:00 BST
A Research and Knowledge Transfer Project designed to curb child abuse in Caribbean countries is being developed by the University of Huddersfield, in partnership with the government of Grenada and UNICEF.
Named IMPACT, it will focus on Grenada, where the government is the first in the region to have introduced child protection legislation. When the island was devastated by hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, aid workers uncovered some shocking cases of child abuse.
Now the IMPACT project will play a key role in further progress. It is led by Professor Adele Jones (pictured, left, with colleague Dr Hazel Da Breo), who is Director of the Centre for Applied Childhood Studies at the University of Huddersfield. She pledges a mixture of intervention and robust research.
Professor Jones was principal investigator for an important UNICEF-funded research project which examined the problem of child sexual abuse in the Eastern Caribbean. IMPACT will build on this work, she says.
The project will have a team of some 13 researchers. Some belong to the University of the West Indies and the two Canadian institutions, but most are supplied by the University of Huddersfield, from its School of Human and Health Sciences and its Business School.
A large number of the team has attended a project management training course at Huddersfield, so that IMPACT – which expects to attract funding of £3 million – can get underway.
Attending the course was Dr Hazel Da Breo, a Grenada-born psychotherapist who will be project manager for IMPACT. Based in Canada for many years, she was the Grenada researcher for Professor Jones’s UNICEF study.
“Child abuse has been an ongoing problem in Caribbean for a very long time, but in Grenada we became crucially aware of it after the hurricanes,” said Dr Da Breo.
“The island was devastated and all kinds of aid was rushed in. Psychologists administering help to families began to see that we had a huge problem with commercialised sexual abuse of children, who were the only items left to barter. It was then that we realised how grave the problem appeared to be and the UNICEF research project made it quite clear.”
Dr Da Breo said she expected to see “complete systemic change” in Grenada.
“We have been working in Grenada and the Caribbean for long enough to be sure that the culture is ready for the change and wants change. We have enormous ambition and we have the staff we need to make our dreams come true.”
The IMPACT team
