Protecting kids against violence
I lie in bed almost every night and listen to the gunshots ringing out in Grants Pen and on Constant Spring Road in Kingston. When I was a girl growing up in Mocho, Clarendon, the only thing I heard at night was cricket in the bush. Then I used to wish those annoying crickets would shut up so I could go to sleep. Now I wish that my kids would hear the crickets instead of the shots.
I wish that they could grow up in a relatively safe environment like I did – where there was very little crime and I could go to sleep with my doors open, if I wanted to.
Instead, the future that faces my children seem to be one of stringent security measures to guard against the high levels of crime and violence in Kingston. Security measures that will confine them but which are necessary because that’s the only way to survive in this city.
What am I going on about?
Well, this week is Mental Health Week and it is being celebrated under the theme ‘The effects of trauma and violence on children and adolescents.’
I am not an adolescent but it is traumatic to deal with the crime and violence as much too often, somebody I know is either robbed, beaten or killed. I can’t help wondering how this will affect my children and I am sure others feel the same.
“There is fighting, shooting or cutting someone up outside the house all the time. I am afraid that either me or my children will be mistaken for someone else and be shot at. Just by being where I am, I could be the next victim,” said one mother from the inner-city. Community violence is a serious threat to the well-being of our children. It refers to exposure, as a witness or through actual experience, to acts of interpersonal violence perpetrated by individuals who are not intimately related to the victim.
Only last week, an 18 year-old girl and her six month-old child were brutally murdered at their home in Montego Bay. This demonstrates an increasingly scant regard for human life.
Results taken from a survey conducted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Europe and Central Asia said that twice as many children feel unsafe in urban (21 per cent) than rural areas (11 per cent). Girls (19 per cent) are more likely to feel unsafe than boys (15 per cent).
Research has also shown that the impact of domestic and community violence on child development is devastating. Some key findings:
. Even infants and toddlers are gravely affected – those infants and toddlers who witness violence either in the community or in the home show excessive irritability, immature behaviour, sleep disturbances, emotional distress, fear of being alone and regression in toileting and language. Exposure also interferes with the normal tendency toddlers have to explore their environment.
. Children who witness community violence are likely to develop a view of the world as hostile and dangerous. Those exposed to multiple forms of violence are more at risk of developing psychological difficulties than those exposed to only one violent event. They are also more likely to become violent themselves.
With the third highest crime rate in the world, Jamaicans are bound to be psychologically affected by all of this. How are we as parents coping? Are we taking our pressures out on our kids? How much can we realistically shield them from witnessing violent acts? Long after this week has passed, these questions will continue to be a part of the parents, dilemma.
