Major Juvenile Justice Reform Conference commences tomorrow

St. Vincent and the Grenadines – Commencing tomorrow at the Methodist Church Hall, will be the first ever National Juvenile Justice Training Conference, through to Friday November 1st 2013.

Formulated for policy makers and practitioners in the sector, it is expected to expose them to a lecture series on available models and approaches of reform. Participants of this conference will also include representatives from the other OECS Member States, the OECS Secretariat, US AID, UNICEF, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States of America.

Additionally, the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ministry of Youth Affairs, National Mobilisation and Social Development has planned a number of community training camps for the rest of 2013 through September 2014.

The target groups are parents and youth in the communities to develop tool kits for parents to improve their roles and responsibilities in identifying and treating deviant behavior.

Additionally training have also been planned for practitioners, who will be certified in the fields of therapy, risk assessments, and care and protection of victims and youth in conflict with the law becomes top priority.

However, there may be serious obstacles encountered, according to Minister of Youth Affairs, National Mobilisation and Social Development Frederick Stephenson.

“All these achievements will be short lived if we fail to install the appropriate systems to compliment these programme interventions, hence the need to establish technical cooperation through consultants with the relevant expertise to assist us in the development of a comprehensive and cohesive systemic model to sustain the reform process.”

It is expected that once this reform process is implemented, “Our sector will be able to see improvements in victims support, youth rehabilitation, family reintegration and behavior modification,” the Minister concluded. (Robertson S. Henry/robertsons.henry@gmail.com)