Jamaica readies adoption law and CPFSA overhaul to speed family placements

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Senator Dana Morris Dixon, Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, said Wednesday that amendments to laws covering adoption, paired with internal changes at the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), should strip friction from matching youngsters with families. She placed equal weight on drafting a clear fostering regime, noting that none exists at present.

She was answering queries from reporters following the week's Cabinet deliberations at Jamaica House in St Andrew.

"We have to look at how we can make the process go quicker. We have to look at, obviously, the right of the parent versus the right of the child and how we can move it along more quickly. We have a lot of children in State care and we all know that the best place for our children is in a home with a loving family. It's a family structure that you want them in, and so we have a responsibility to move that along more quickly but, legally, based on the Adoption Act, we are not able to move it at the speed we want to from that basis," she said.

"So, we have to fix the law and then we have to fix administratively everything in the CPFSA to make it move more quickly, so we're going to do that…; it's really about facilitating faster adoptions in the country and also about adding a framework around fostering, which currently does not exist in our country," the minister noted.

She said, too, that a Joint Select Committee of Parliament would be formed to pull more Jamaican voices into talks on adoption.

"One of the things we are exploring is rolling everything into the CCPA (Child Care and Protection Act) because… when you think about it, it would be about adoptions, fostering, and so we're looking at putting everything under that one umbrella. So, it's going to be a big piece of legislation and we're going to take it to a joint select committee because we know a lot of Jamaicans do have an interest in this area and we want to be able to ventilate any changes that we are going to make," she continued.

-JIS