There is an urgent call for the nation to build more righteous altars to counteract a spirit of sexual perversion that has taken over and is contributing to the increasing spate of violence in our schools. The call is being made by former director of the Victim Services Division (VSD) within the Ministry of Justice, Reverend Osbourne Bailey.
Bailey, who worked at the VSD, an arm of the Ministry of Justice that provides therapeutic intervention for victims of violence islandwide, is particularly concerned about the number of children who are being sexually abused. During his more than 20 years at the VSD, which was previously called the Victim Support Unit, he had interacted with over 200,000 victims. About 60 percent of those he saw during his tenure, which ended in 2022, were children.
“The sex thing has taken on a life of its own. There is a spirit of perversion, I like to call it,” he told Freedom Come Rain during a recent interview.
“Perversion is about causing sexual immorality to appear normal and okay, and accepted,” he explained.
Rev. Bailey, who is the pastor of Covenant Life Christian Church in Kingston, noted that both boys and girls are being lured into sexual perversion.
“The group that is luring the children into sex, although I don’t know if I should call them a group because they are so organised, but the ones that are luring the children into sex, is so comprehensive, pervasive that I don’t think the church has really opened its eyes to the extent. It does not know any boundaries, so they lure church children, rich pickney, everybody. They lure girls, they lure boys into all kinds of activities that are sex-related,” he noted.
Because of the abuse experienced by these children, they have become emotionally, socially, and even spiritually broken, so they no longer believe in God. These broken children have become so traumatised that they have normalised otherwise deviant behaviours like extortion, killing, and promiscuity.
Rev. Bailey believes a lot of the acts of violence that are being displayed at schools today are a result of this brokenness. Education minister Fayval Williams has described the spate of violence in schools as “madness.” In her recent contribution to the sectoral debate, she noted that there were 55 critical incidents that occurred every 3.5 days across the education sector over the 190 school days spanning January 2022 to January 2023.
“It is instructive to note that the 55 critical incidents occurred at 50 different schools—15 primary and 35 high schools. Five of the schools had two critical incidents each,” she said.
Rev. Bailey noted that in the past, most of the reports of sexual violence involved older men and younger girls. That has changed, as both victims and perpetrators are getting younger, the sex acts are longer, and boys are being sexually molested by both women and men. Most of the sex acts in the past were between the opposite sex, but homosexual activities are becoming more widely practiced.
“Everyone used to protest heterosexual brokenness, but now there is a group that seems to think it’s a part of human rights today to be LGBTQ broken. You can’t even say homosexual, because they want their proper title,” he said before adding that one of the major challenges is that the group is of the view that their sexual activities are normal. The Bible, he said, determines acceptable sexual behaviour.
“They told me in a meeting years ago that they are smarter than us in the church. We believe that getting up on a platform on a Sunday morning and yelling at people is going to make a change, while they believe in investing their money and waiting patiently. They believe in training and approaching colleges and universities, and take the mind first before they take the body,” he shared.
Unfortunately, the village is no longer raising the child, and so children are susceptible to sexual deviants. To compound the issue, there is the reality that children and their abusers are sometimes in the same household.
The pastor considers the village to be an established set of principles about what is right and what is wrong, and what is normal and what is not normal. “Those who embrace these principles would be considered the new village, and the new village needs to put their money where their mouth is to educate, to advance, to pray, preach, teach, and live,” he said.
Efforts should also be made to re-erect righteous altars in our schools. Altars, he noted, are designed to position people to encounter God. However, these altars are being removed from places of learning and are being replaced by ungodly altars.
“The altars that we are talking about are not structures; [they are] not physical. They could be policies [or] anything that opposes genuine worship.”
He said Christians should cut down these altars, and “if they [ungodly persons] re-erect them, God will cut them down himself, like what he did to Dagan.”
As the spirit of perversion takes aim at the nation’s children, Rev. Bailey finds that those who protest it are made to feel as though they are doing something wrong. He urged parents to properly monitor their children, given what is now happening.