A child like all other human beings has inalienable rights.

(Lucretia Mott)
Good day teachers, I, Kamilla Garrick will be presenting on the theme
“Children and their rights”; I will be expounding on the topic “Issues that
have caused on infringement on the rights of a child to survive and develop in
Jamaica. I chose this theme because I have seen many children in Jamaica
(even ones close to me) suffer at the hands of society. The topic was chosen
because I found children rights interesting and wanted to explore on one of
these rights to see how children’s rights are neglected and what can be done to
rectify these issues.

The exposition will be focusing on the issues brought out from the sources and
an evaluation of these sources will be done using the CRAAP TEST, also
challenges faced while doing this research will be outlined. The secondary
source being evaluated is an article entitled, “Situation Analysis of Jamaican
children” and the primary source being evaluated is my questionnaire.

Infringement is defined as the act of breaking or violating terms of a law or an

agreement and children rights are a set of human rights which pay special
attention to minors (children under the age of 18). The issues of children
rights have been with Jamaica for a number of years and the lack of
upholding these rights have caused many Jamaican children to not properly
survive and develop to their fullest potential. The evaluation of my primary
source which is a questionnaire will focus on validity, credibility and
reliability. The questionnaire consist of 10 questions ranging from
demographic to more in-depth questions on the topic, with a response of 47
persons on some questions. This was distributed via the internet on a platform
known as Google Forms.

The primary source being evaluated can be seen as reliable as respondents

were known to the researcher as anonymous, making the respondents lose
fear of judgement and answered all questions with complete honesty. The
source can be deemed as credible as 97.8% of the respondents had knowledge
of the theme, as asked in a question ‘Have you heard about children rights?’
also it can be said to credible as most of the respondents had an educational
background of a high school diploma right up to bachelors degree thus
making it credible. Validity can be seen from the questionnaire as respondent
were asked if “Every child has the right to survival and development in the
best way possible?” 45 out of 47 respondents (95.7%) strongly agreed with the
question but 3 out of 47 (6.4%) simply agreed. Validity can also be seen in the
questionnaire were the question asked ‘Issues that affect the children around
you? Most persons checked poverty as being one of the main issues that
affects children (55.6%) but crime and violence, poor education, health and
nutrition were also checked to be prominent issues affecting children in the
questionnaire.

The secondary source being evaluated is an article entitled “Situation Analysis

of Jamaican children” written and published by UNICEF Jamaica. UNICEF
is an agency that is responsible for providing humanitarian development aid
to children worldwide. The situation analysis focuses on the challenges
children face that makes them vulnerable and puts them at risk of not
developing to their fullest potential. Some of these challenges include poverty
and social protection, violence and safety, education and many others. The
article was published in the year 2018. This date is important as it
corroborates the sources as being reliable and up to date making it relevant to
speak on the issue that infringes a child’s rights to survive and develop in
Jamaica. The article is not outdated as there is no new information released.
The article can be deemed credible as it provides factual information. The
article was written to address the general public and this can be seen in the
choice of words, phrases and explanations of acronyms and statistics. The
publisher addresses the issues starting form positive to the negative deviating
from being bias. The content of the article had reliable and correctness of
information, it was well researched and provides sufficient evidence of such in
the use of statistics. An expository style of writing as used to make the point
that there are issues that infringes a child’s right to survive and develop in
Jamaica. The publisher uses a formal tone and the use of imagery to develop a
true understanding of the topic. UNICEF’S purpose is to inform readers
about the significant shortfalls of the Jamaican government’s obligation to
better protect and safeguard the future of Jamaican children.

Many challenges were faced while conducting this research. Those include:
respondents for the questionnaires took a bit of time to answer the questions,
some of the questions were not answered properly, learning how to use the
Google forms platform for administrating the questionnaire and the most
challenging was adapting to doing everything online due to the pandemic
(COVID-19). All these challenges made the research complex.
In conclusion, the evaluation of my sources brought out useful information. It
made the researcher and the general public aware of the issues children face
that have caused an infringement on the rights for them to survive and
develop in Jamaica. This was done by explaining statistics and acronyms. The
research was useful for my theme of “Children and their rights” and the topic
“issues that have caused an infringement on the rights of a child to survive
and develop in Jamaica”.