The theme for this year’s observance of Child Month is “Children Need our Love and Protection –Get Involved”  and that is certainly appropriate, especially in light of the fact that in the last 2 months, two seven-year-old girls have been raped, one murdered and the other one left for dead. Violence against our children has escalated and the data supports this alarming trend. While the majority of crimes are committed against girls, boys are also sodomized, probably more than is reported due to our homophobia, and they are certainly equally abused physically, verbally, and emotionally.

As we contemplate this lofty theme, I hope that we can each demonstrate that loving and protecting our children is really a lived experience. We have to probe and ask ourselves why, overwhelmingly,  many Jamaican children are treated so cruelly and what do we expect will happen if we continue to nurture and raise a generation whose lived reality is one of abuse and who do not believe that their life is valued?

 I firmly believe that a society that is unable to protect its children ostensibly is a society that is doomed. Data shows that violence begets violence and abused children/adults often end up abusing others as their survival often dictated that they internalize their pain. So we have to ask these difficult but necessary questions: 1. What support do parents need in order to effectively love and protect their children? 2. What is it that the government needs to do in order to ensure that children are loved and protected? 3. How do we ensure that children and parents know what children’s rights are and that those rights are monitored and protected in very real and tangible ways? Children are the future and it takes a village to raise a child are maxims that are not widely practiced in Jamaica anymore.

 One of the most basic and profound things that need to happen – since most of these incidents of child abduction/ trafficking and child abuse occur when children are on their own to or from school– is that the government needs to provide transportation for children in all areas throughout the island, especially in inner-city communities and rural areas, with a driver, male or female, who has been vetted and trained to transport children safely.

 Further, parents should be advised, (and this might be difficult for some working-class parents) that no child under the age of 10, no matter how close to the school he/she lives should be sent to school alone. Somebody must and should always accompany that child and ensure that they are inside the school gate because the two incidents of the girls being abducted and raped were close to their homes. Quite frankly, sending a 7-year-old child on their own, regardless of how much information they have about predators/abductors, is negligible. I think there needs to be legislation that children under 10 should not be on the streets unattended. Further, it should be compulsory that predators and mentally ill persons living in communities with children, be identified. In many of these cases, the perpetrators – rapists and murderers– are known to the community which then remains silent until an atrocity happens. We cannot and must not allow this to continue.

My fellow Jamaicans, we must work to protect our children. It is no longer enough to give lip service to these maxims; they have to become our collective lived reality. Our children need to feel and know that they are going to be protected from physical, verbal, and mental abuse and from pedophiles who seem to be increasing in our society. It is our job as respectable concerned citizens to ensure the protection of all children by lending support to those parents who don’t have the means to do so, and to demand that the government puts in the needed resources to protect all our children regardless of the socio-economic disparities. Jamaica, if we truly desire a future that is not plagued by violence and disregard for humanity, then we must begin today to make sure all our children know they are valued, loved and protected to enjoy a safe, violence-free life.