00:00A 23-year-old Venezuelan national has been charged with one count of cruelty to a child and one count
00:07of wasteful employment after investigations revealed that a baby she had carried into the South Orupuch police station claiming to
00:15have found abandoned in a box is actually her child.
00:19The child has since been taken into state custody.
00:23Meantime, the Single Mothers Association is questioning why the police did not take a more compassionate route.
00:30It can't be cruelty because instead of cruelty, it was out of fear and not knowing what to do.
00:39If it was cruelty, we would have never found that baby or we would have found the baby at a
00:44later stage on our lives.
00:48So in that aspect of looking at it, it's not cruelty.
00:52I would say more it was fair.
00:54She did not know how to, what to, her circumstances, we don't know.
01:00And that was the line of action that she took.
01:04Association President Xiumin Howe is also calling for the burden of accountability to be shared.
01:09This young lady can identify who the father of the child is and he can take some responsibility as well
01:16because it takes two to bear a child.
01:19And the authorities should investigate who he may be as well with gathering information from her and they can now
01:27see who he is and he can play an active role in assisting with this present situation.
01:34Still, the association is seeking to make it clear that it does not support child abandonment nor the wasting of
01:41police time.
01:42However, the association is calling on the authorities to do a better job at educating the public and providing support
01:49for vulnerable persons.
01:51We have to put out there to make it public knowledge where we can get the resources, get the help
01:58for anybody that may be in predicaments like these.
02:02Not, not encouraging it, but for those who are already in the situations.
02:08So we won't have a case like this of an abandonment of a baby or, you know, these unborn children.
02:16Even before they're born, you're finding fetuses all over the place in the past.
02:21So to prevent things like this from ever happening again, we need to open doors and show persons the way
02:28out of it.
02:29We can tap into the schools where these young, young teenage girls are and bring family planning classes to the
02:37schools.
02:38We can't wait till they are young adults.
02:41Ms. Howe further notes that a large percentage of households in this country are single mother households.
02:47And she laments the numbers are growing.
02:49We have been in existence for the past 14 years and we have done a demographic survey, we ran a
02:57demographic survey for about eight years now.
03:00And we have gathered information, statistics, that we have 31,000 plus single mother homes across Trinidad and Tobago.
03:13And in the last eight years, it has even grown more because we paused on the survey about four years,
03:20three years ago, right?
03:22So I'm sure since that time to now, it has grown.
03:25We do not promote single motherhood or single mother families.
03:31Life is living and things happen.
03:34One, we are just an association that is here to be the median between single mothers and the help that
03:42they can get to be in a much better financial, spiritual, physical situation to deal with raising these young children.
03:52Vanessa Cutting, TV6 News.
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