Weep, weep for the children!
THE murder, rape and general abuse of Jamaican children have triggered a call from over 50 Kingston and St Andrew communities for harsher punishment of perpetrators.
“Let there be no leniency towards such criminals and neither should they be shielded by the public,” declared youth advocate Lawman Lynch.
“Offer them no bail. You have caught them, keep them,” Lynch urged the government.
Lynch, the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence, was among participants at a press conference called by the Kingston and St Andrew Action Forum (KSA-AF) which represents more than 50 communities in Kingston and St Andrew.
The Mustard Seed Communities Children’s Home for abandoned, disabled, mentally challenged and HIV/AIDS infected children in the inner-city community of Mahoe Drive, off Hagley Park Road in Kingston, provided appropriate background for Lynch’s lamentations against the pain inflicted on children.
Members of the KSA-AF contended that Jamaica was in dire straits, citing several recent ‘alarming cases’, including the murder of a four-month-old baby and the murder of four young men who were found with their throats cut.
Lynch, impassioned in his plea, suggested that caregivers and teachers who had knowledge of children being abused and yet refused to communicate this information to the authorities should be booted from the system.
“Teachers and caregivers should not remain in the school system if they turn a blind eye. Parents and caregivers need to be brought to book,” he said. He proposed a 9:30 pm curfew with a half-hour grace period for all children to be off the streets between Monday and Thursday nights.
While not detailing how such an initiative would be enforced, he said parents, guardians and law officers could prove to be effective in this undertaking.
“I have a vision for Jamaica… where the sound of our children’s laughter is heard more than the sound of weeping in our streets,” Lynch said.
In her turn, Captain Antiapie Blaise, representing the Salvation Army’s Allman Town Corps, said Jamaica had reached its breaking point. Through her work in many inner-city communities, she said, she had found that “our country has a lot to be ashamed of”.
“When we are good, we are good, but on the issue of child abuse we seem to be getting better at being horrible,” she said, adding that murder was the last straw in the string of abuses suffered by Jamaican children.
She said persons should also be reminded that abuse included children being on the streets at night, not attending school, showing up hungry for school and having no books.
“Abuse is children being afraid to go to sleep because they are alone in the house. Abuse is children not being able to respond to a hug because they are not used to them.
“It seems we have come to see these as elementary abuses and so we have graduated to murder. We have a lot to be ashamed of,” she said.
She also took issue with persons who have accused the church of being silent.
According to Blaise, the church had been speaking relentlessly, but had “been tuned out in favour of degrading, immoral and violence-promoting lyrics or can’t be heard above the screams of families mourning another victim”.
“But what if the church was silent? Do we really need to be told not to molest our children? Does someone need to tell us it is inhumane to rape and murder our children?” she queried.
Blaise, however, noted that while many times it seemed that the hand of the law was “short, the hands of the almighty God are not”.
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, you don’t want to make the mistake of falling into the hands of God for what you have done to his children,” she warned.
Meanwhile, representative of the Office of the Children’s Advocate Dwayne Cargill said there was a need to urgently scale up activities in the area of protection.
Cargill cited supporting data from a single hospital which indicated that in 2006, some 185 children were treated for physical assault, 79 for sexual assault and 30 for gunshot wounds.
“This tells us the issue is of great magnitude and we need to make a substantive effort to protect our children. We have to be prepared to stamp out child abuse in its many forms and one way we can do this is to take some hard and unpopular decisions,” he said.
Cargill said that while the laws regarding sexual offences and incest had been revised, there was “still an urgent need for these to be finalised and enacted”.
Joining the call for the establishment of the registry of sexual offenders, Cargill said there was also the need for the Obscene Publications Act to be updated, the law with respect to pornography drafted, discussed and finalised and the Occupational Health and Safety Act revised and expedited.
Furthermore, he said, legislation should be enacted to give teeth to the National Policy for HIV/AIDS Management in Schools.