By Tyrone Reid, Staff Reporter
THE EMERGENCY response team, which has a mandate to rescue children who are victims of abuse and neglect, is late in coming.
The brainchild of the Child Development Agency (CDA), the team was slated to come on stream by the third quarter
(July-August) of 2004.
The idea to develop and implement the response team came as a result of the number of cases of abused children brought to the attention of the local authorities.
"We had hoped to get our new children's officers, but we weren't able to do that because of resource constraints," Alison Anderson, head of the CDA told The Gleaner on Monday.
Ms. Anderson said the CDA's budget for last year was not sufficient to facilitate the acquisition of the staff complement needed to launch the project.
As it now stands, the CDA is still in the process of selecting team members, she said.
"We have completed the selection for two regions. Today (Monday) they are in the
southern region, so we just have one more region (remaining)."
Ms. Anderson pledged that by May 15 of this year, the 60 new children's officers should be employed.
