National counselling centre for school children

Nadira GUNATILLEKE

The National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) will set up a National Students Counselling Centre to serve school children.

School children will be able to obtain the service of this centre by visiting the centre or over the phone, NCPA Chairman Jagath Wellawatta said.

He said Sri Lankan school children need a National Counselling Centre because they have many problems, especially the teenage school children. "Most of them do not have a person to turn to when they face problems. Until the NCPA opens this Service, it will make available telephone lines for children to talk about their problems", he said.

According to Wellawatta, some recent incidents that took place in certain state and private schools in Sri Lanka highlighted the requirement of a National Students Counselling Service/Centre.

"This centre will be the first step of the national program and it will save many innocent lives of school children. Most of the time school children commit suicide because they have no one to trust and talk about their problems without fear," he said. "When studying child abuse cases reported to the NCPA, a very clear trend can be identified.

It is the mothers who use their own children to get divorced while acquiring the custody of the child and properties.

They do it by teaching the child to accuse his/her own father for molesting him/her.

But many in depth investigations have revealed that it was the mothers who exploited the child by teaching them to lie and sometimes harming children by various means in order to prove that the father molested the child, he added.