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Hedge Funds Care - Facts

The stories are difficult to hear and impossible to comprehend. Pre-pubescent girls are forced to provide ‘favours’ for male visitors to their homes in return for drugs or are left alone for days at a time to fend for themselves while drug-addicted parents party. Three minors were all impregnated by the same adult male. The girls were expelled from school because of their ‘condition’. A child from a loving home is sexually molested and beaten by a group of older boys at his school.

Despite the numerous and graphic anecdotal accounts, actual statistics of child abuse and neglect are hard to come by in Cayman – figures differ depending on the reporting agency, but all are exceptionally low – as few as a couple dozen cases per year. The number of people employed in this area of Cayman’s social services and the case loads of those social workers attest to incidence far greater than this. The staggering statistics from the United States, for illustrative purposes, indicate that one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before the age of 18.

One must wonder what would possess someone to ignore and not report obvious signs of child abuse, but it happens here, just as it happens in any other community. It is natural to want to protect a family’s reputation, or to fear for one’s job or any of the other personal consequences that might arise from filing such a report. At times it is hard to stand strong in the face of adversity, but this explains why reporting has been mandated in so many other developed countries in the world. People will often do what is easy, not what is right.

Encouragingly, a light has been shone into the dark corners of this area of Cayman’s society over the past two or three years and there seems to be a greater understanding of the underlying causes of abuse. Substance abuse, mental illness, domestic violence, prior victimisation, and poverty (linked with underemployment or lack of access to employment) are some of the factors that cause family strain and can put children at risk. With this understanding comes a willingness to adapt. While the term ‘child sexual abuse’ once caused a room full of seminar attendees to get up and walk out, now there are hundreds of people lined up to receive training on identifying the potential for child sexual abuse and how to protect children from predators. The Children’s Law, which includes a mandatory reporting clause, was passed in March 2009, and is a giant step to providing protection for the most vulnerable members of our society. We eagerly await the regulations that will allow the law to be implemented. Three years ago, a local journalist reported that child abuse was not a problem in Cayman because he did not want to offend anyone. Today we read of this issue in the press. People are finally starting to talk about this issue openly which is the first step.

Hedge Funds Care Cayman (HFCC), which formed as a chapter of the global organisation in 2005, has undoubtedly been a force for change locally in addressing attitudes surrounding child abuse and neglect in Cayman. The parent organisation, Hedge Funds Care, with a sole vision of preventing and treating child abuse and neglect, was first created in 1998 by a concerned group of professionals working in the hedge fund industry in New York. Since that time, HFC has raised over US$20m that has gone to support programmes to protect and treat kids. Over US$950,000 has been raised and spent in Cayman in the past four years alone.

As a fundraising and grant-making committee, HFCC is uniquely positioned to provide an independent view of what services are available, where there are synergies and where the gaps might be. Eager to hear from the people working in the various facets of Cayman social services, in 2005 HFCC hosted a forum of representatives from every child protection agency on the island, from the Health Services Authority to the police, to discuss the issues surrounding prevention, public awareness and service provision. This conversation, along with the guidance of the committee’s academic advisors, provided the blueprint of a long term plan for child welfare for HFCC. The high level of passion and determination to care for and protect vulnerable children amongst the attending group was evident and heart-warming, but an underlying current of frustration was also steering the group. Citing the countless studies and reports that had been commissioned and then shelved, the agencies felt that positive change was illusive. Sometimes a challenge needs only fresh eyes to see the solution.

Since that group meeting, great strides have been made in building awareness in our community of the traumas inflicted; organisations are working together, forming alliances that focus on specialised training of key employees and persons dealing with young victims of abuse, and specific personnel needs have been identified and met through HFCC funding. HFCC remains committed to providing financial and programme development assistance for agencies and activities that strengthen vulnerable families, building community resources for at risk families, preserving the integrity of the family without jeopardising child safety, enhancing permanency planning, improving foster care and adoption, and providing clinical treatment to victims as well as supporting non-offending family members. HFCC is also committed to enhancing general awareness within the community and increasing the awareness of children to the problem of abuse in order to facilitate disclosure and break the cycle.

Watching HFCC grow and enhance its ability to support larger projects has been satisfying. It has been heart-warming to see so many members of Cayman’s hedge funds industry, alongside unrelated organisations in Cayman who have become ‘Friends of Hedge Funds Care’, join together to raise the funds to make it possible to launch numerous child abuse prevention and treatment initiatives in Cayman. It is wonderful to see that in addition to the huge value the financial services community brings to the island economically, it also contributes so greatly from a humanitarian point of view.

This collective effort is encouraging because it indicates the realisation within this community that the only way to make the earlier stories a thing of the past is for the whole community to act. It means that the court, police, neighbours, counsellors, government, doctors, nurses, clergy, teachers and you and me must work together to put an end to it.
Every kid deserves that kind of commitment.