Director of Hear the Children Cry, Nigel Cooper, recently lamented that Jamaica has become an anti-child society where violence, abuse and neglect of our children are becoming increasingly common.
Strong objections to Cooper’s lament blazed up social media pages as soon as the words left his lips. Some people vociferously argued that there is no evidence that Jamaica has turned her back on her babies.
But last week alone, the nude body of a ten year old girl was discovered raped and throat slashed in the sleepy farming community of Troy, in Trelawny. The very next day, the body of a newborn baby with signs of animal interference was discovered in bushes in the exotic tourism resort town of Port Antonio, Portland. That same afternoon the police were busy probing a suspected case of suicide involving a 17-year-old college student in Carty Hill near James Hill in northern Clarendon.
These gruesome incidents across Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey, the nation’s three counties, underline the fact that the island of Jamaica has entered a new phase of disregard and mistreatment of our children.
We live in a nation where 22,000 babies are secretly plucked from their mothers’ wombs annually. We are a country where some 50 children are killed in violent incidents and up to 1,500 are reported missing every year.
While the majority of those who go missing return home, a large number of them bear evidence of sexual abuse, and many have no knowledge of who abducted them or where they were held.
For very good reasons God, by divine order, provides for children to be born and raised in the context of a secure marriage union, but Jamaica has long abandoned the traditional family. The popular choice is to be fruitful and multiply in loose, insecure and obscure arrangements.
Approximately 26,000 to 30,000 children are born outside of wedlock in Jamaica every year. This accounts for roughly 85% to 86% of all live births on the island. Very often babies conceived in unstable unions are used as bargaining chips to keep wayward men committed to women they will never marry.
For too many heartbroken baby mothers, disintegrating relationships with their deadbeat baby fathers result in the innocent offspring suffering physical abuse, being abandoned or flung to their intended end in garbage heaps.
Studies have also unearthed a super high level of paternity fraud across the island. Especially in communities with a high unemployment rate and a lack of state-sponsored social safety nets, the ‘jacket’ phenomenon is rife. Desperate women assign paternity of their unborn babies to their most financially stable sexual partner to secure basic resources and survival for the child.
DNA testing labs estimate that adverse paternity results hover between 23% and 47% of tested cases. Sociologists and anthropologists, such as Dr. Herbert Gayle from the University of the West Indies, emphasise that the crisis is deeply tethered to systemic socio-economic factors rather than simple malicious deception.
Financial crisis in homes and communities have also led some mothers to pimp out their young daughters or send their sons to hustle on street corners to feed themselves and their families.
Sexual violence against girls in Jamaica is critically high, with national surveys showing that nearly one in four females experience sexual violence in childhood, and over 40% of those affected experience their first assault at age 13 or younger.
In 2020, in the height of the COVID plandemic, schools were closed and the children were flung online for lessons. Very few were monitored at home, and many were exposed to illicit lessons and led into inappropriate encounters by predators in the virtual space.
According to the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA), while the children were away from school between January 2019 and December 2020, there were some 43,312 reported incidents of child abuse in Jamaica, with an average of 60 reports being made daily.
Children who are sexually exposed or abused suffer psychological stress, anxiety, and learning disorders and other mental health issues. Insecure, obscure and financially challenged families are ill-equipped to handle these matters.
God’s thoughts towards children are abundantly clear. Whether or not they are born to wedded parents, anyone who hurts a child, directly or indirectly, will face the divine wrath. Too many of our children have been hurt. Jamaica is paying a high price for this wickedness.
Social media may reject Cooper’s lament, but God will not. The stench of our wickedness against our children has risen up to the heavens, and we will pay for it.
If we do not repent, disgrace and ruin will be our certain portion. Already, unspeakable evil is loose in the land, and we have become a cursed nation with little compassion for the citizenry. Families fight families for spurious reasons; lust rules relationships, and mercy, especially for the most vulnerable, is lost.
God will not acquit the wicked, especially those entrusted to raise and protect our children. Those who partner with the forces of darkness to pursue and harm the innocent will not be spared, regardless of class or the position they may hold in society.
Cooper’s lament demands more than public acknowledgement of systemic brokenness, failure of families and the need for institutional reform. It calls for collective mourning and urgent renewal and realignment with the will and purposes of God for marriage, families and the nurturing of children. But all of this must begin with repentance.