Police force moves to protect children before harm occurs
ON JUNE 24, 2026, the Royal Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force’s Sexual Offences Unit has launched a pilot program built on the urgent premise that children should never have to learn about danger from the inside of it.
The program,called STEPS which is, an acronym for Smart Teens Empowered to Prevent Situations, opened at the SVG Mission of Seventh Day Adventists Mission Headquarters with grade six students from the Kingstown Preparatory School as its first cohort. Parents, teachers, and officers filled the room alongside them.
Officer in Charge of the Sexual Offences Unit, Mr. Nigel Butcher, told the students why they had been chosen to go first. He said the unit had noticed a troubling rise in sexual activity among young people, particularly those moving from primary to secondary school. STEPS therefore was built to meet that moment, teaching students to identify peer pressure and manipulation, understand the consequences of early sexual activity, and build the confidence to make safe decisions.
Commissioner of Police Mr. Enville Williams described how predatory adults operate not through force but through attention, gifts, phone credit, rides, and what he called “so-called kindness.” Behind those gestures, he said, sits manipulation and coercion, and by the time police get involved, the harm has often already happened.
“This is not good enough,” he told the gathering. The Police Force, he said, cannot only investigate crime after it happens. It has a duty to prevent it before it starts, and that duty is what brought everyone into that room.
The Commissioner spoke directly to the students about what they should expect from the adults around them: that no one, under any circumstance, should make them feel pressured, ashamed, or afraid. If anyone does, he told them, tell a parent, tell a teacher, tell the police. “You will be heard.”
He also turned to the wider community, calling out a culture of looking away. Too many Vincentians, he said, have watched inappropriate behaviour toward children and dismissed it as none of their business. That silence, he said, has protected wrongdoers for far too long, and STEPS is part of changing that.
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