Blue Teddy Bear Campaign Confronts Child Abuse Crisis in Belize

Public outrage over crimes against children is growing, and it’s driving action. In recent weeks, multiple arrests for alleged sexual violence against minors have sparked concern nationwide. Today, community workers joined a UNICEF-led training to better spot warning signs and report abuse. Lead consultant Carla Alvarez says giving communities these tools strengthen Belize’s frontline defense to protect its most vulnerable.

 

Carla Alvarez, Lead Consultant

“Yes, there is that stigma, and I think a big part of it, in all of these, trainings that we’re doing is that people always raise the same concern to say that, sometimes we see things, but we are afraid to report because there’s that fear that we’re gonna be exposed as the reporter, right? But I think that we have reached a point in our society, we know that our children, our younger children, are exposed from an earlier age to things that perhaps us as adults when we were that age were not exposed to because of technology and so on, right? And we have to look at the conventions of the rights of the child. We have to see that child protection is everybody’s business. It’s not just the business of the police or community-based organizations or UNICEF or NCFC, right? It’s everybody’s business. I think we have to be more open about talking about some of these things. One of the things that in the training has come up today is we talked that child abuse and child violence does not only happen in societies or in homes of parents that might be of a low socioeconomic status, right? It happens at all, all levels, right? So there has to be that talk and there has to be that dialogue about what exactly is child abuse and violence, right? It’s more than sexual violence, physical violence. There’s psychological, there’s emotional abuse, there’s neglect, right? A lot of it. So one of the goals or the objectives of this training is to ensure that everybody understands the ramifications of what encompasses abuse and violence.”

 

Today’s training is one of several sessions aimed at equipping officers with the tools tools to recognize early warning signs and safely address sensitive crimes affecting these vulnerable communities.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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