Committee agrees to scrap three-referral limit under Child Diversion Act

Members of Parliament’s joint select committee reviewing the Child Diversion Act have agreed to remove Section 13 of the legislation, which currently limits a child’s eligibility for participation in a diversion programme to three referrals or if the child commits another offence within three years of entering a programme. The decision follows a review of data showing that repeat referrals are relatively uncommon and that, in most of the cases identified, children who returned to the programme either successfully completed it or were still participating. During a sitting of the committee on Wednesday, director of Child Diversion Branch at the Ministry of Justice Venisa Clarke told the committee that up to the end of the last fiscal year, 29 of 2,966 children had been referred to a diversion programme more than once.

She said a cursory review of those 29 cases found that most were either successful or ongoing, while four had returned to the system after failing to complete the programme, or for another reason. That information helped strengthen the argument that the law should not set a fixed ceiling on the number of opportunities available to a child. Committee Chairman Delroy Chuck said the figures suggested that children who were referred a second time were, in most cases, benefiting from the intervention.

“We are saying even where they recur, which is, less than two per cent, the child seemed to benefit from the second referral,” said Chuck as he argued that children could benefit from the diversion programme even after a fourth, or fifth referral. He further explained that children between 12 and 17 years old could encounter difficulties at different stages of their adolescence and should not necessarily be forced into the formal court process simply because they had reached the statutory limit on referrals. “But the point I’m really making…is that we can’t give up on the children.

Now, the only restriction, what could happen, by the way, is that if the child is referred again to the Child Diversion Committee, and the child or the Child Diversion Committee feels that they can’t benefit anymore from the programme, then other additional or alternative means would be found. “But at the end of the day, it means that if a child is to be referred a fourth and fifth time, that is a troubled child and therefore, we shouldn’t just say no...