Winds of change are blowing through an important sector falling under the government’s responsibility and which has been crying out to be administered with greater sensitivity.
The words ‘crying out’ are apt for this concerns vulnerable children, such as those in care or who have migrated to Malta unaccompanied.
The State is making moves to embrace more closely, through its structures and laws, children who do not have a mother or father to protect them, whether by default or circumstance.
For one thing, the legislation being proposed will make it easier to provide a permanent family to a greater number of children who are fostered or are living in residential care.
One idea is to introduce permanent fostering in cases where the situation warrants it, giving the foster family stronger parental rights, removing the uncertainty of a half-yearly review and allowing for better planning of the child’s future.
Another proposal is to facilitate the process whereby children in residential care can be adopted. Except in certain cases such as abuse, the biological parents can block adoption through the courts even if they have long abandoned their children. It is envisaged that this possibility will no longer constitute a major obstacle to adoption in the future.
Other proposed measures include broadening the types of care orders to be better suited to different circumstances, making it mandatory for people who work with children to report abuse or negligence, strengthening the child advocate system and setting up a dedicated pre-placement child assessment centre.
There has been a major force behind these and other coming changes in laws on children. While she was social policy minister, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca worked hard towards the introduction of a Child Protection Act and the consolidation of legislation pertaining to children into a single set of laws.
She set up the National Commission for Child Policy and Strategy, which was instrumental in raising understanding of children’s experiences of being removed from families and placed in care.
Its report, The Voice of Children in Care, makes for uncomfortable reading: of isolation, helplessness and lack of information. The latter was highlighted as a major shortcoming of the system, with children saying they had not been told why they were in an institution and not seeing siblings without knowing why.
Ms Coleiro Preca speaks very much from the heart when she discusses the needs of vulnerable children such as these, as she did in Parliament during her last speech as MP before being sworn in as the ninth President of Malta.
She also became passionate when talking about unaccompanied migrant children and the need to give them much better protection. Kept in detention centres, they are treated like criminals and are also prone to sexual harassment and abuse.
The Prime Minister has now pledged to put an end to the detention of migrant children and deserves praise. But the fact it exists at all, as well as the way some children are treated when being placed under care order, should shame the nation.
“Politicians should listen to children and should not fear changing the system. Let them be heard,” Ms Coleiro Preca pleaded with fellow MPs in Parliament.
In her, in no less a figure than the President, vulnerable children appear to have found a new champion. The other MPs in the chamber that day must honour her ministerial legacy by keeping up her momentum of legislative change in favour of vulnerable minors.