Imani Tafari-Ama | Children’s security is a human right

It is understandable if you are suffering from whiplash to follow the gory details of the news in today’s Jamaica. We are still reeling from the incredible story released a year and a half ago of Gabriel King, whose mother was allegedly boxed in her face and pulled from her vehicle as she was negotiating potholes in a Montego Bay district. King was on the back seat of her car as the assailant sped off with the vehicle.

His bloody body was found shortly thereafter, with his throat slashed. It was, therefore, with a sense of déjà vu that a shocked public learned last week,of the abduction of eight-year-old Danielle Rowe from the Braeton Primary School, who was taken to Vineyard Town, where she was dumped on the road from a car, with her throat slashed. Concerned citizens took her to hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries three days later. Social media have been rife with these stories, and word is that since the incident, Danielle’s dog has been inconsolable, howling its grief with no recourse.

A society that is unable to protect its children from gruesome murders like these is a failed state. Compounding the threats against children is the normalisation of the annual murder of 1,000 plus mostly young men. While the killing of 800 persons in the election year of 1980 was remarkable then, it is now background noise. And although the Jamaica Constabulary Force reports the murder figures (including those committed by its own body), this has not resulted in the public outrage that should cause the society to acknowledge and act to ensure that children’s security is treated as a human right.

Increasingly, women and children have been suffering from assault from known and unknown assailants. For example, in an extraordinary turn of events, social media influencer Donna Lee Donaldson was murdered by her boyfriend, Corporal Noel Maitland. This is an indicator of the trend of femicide, particularly in cases where assailants have easy access to guns – as happens when women’s partners are police officers, soldiers, and security guards. This does not mean formulating a faulty generalisation and suggesting that all partners of security personnel are under threat, but it is certainly a worrying trend, supported by facts. In this scenario, we may have to attribute the paucity of public outrage to desensitisation, an expression of trauma from overexposure to the wounding that assaults our psychosocial sensibilities with monotonous regularity.

NOT UNUSUAL

Shocking as the murders of Gabriel King and Danielle Rowe are, they are not unusual in a society that supports corporal punishment of children in the home and school as a cultural norm. This tacit endorsement of violence against children is reinforced by the biblical injunction not to “spare the rod and spoil the child”. This religious response is reinforced by the notion that children are the personal property of their parents, who are free to make decisions for them, without their consent. The tried-and-true maxim that “children should be seen and not heard” is another entrenched perception that justifies violence against children and denies them their agency to act as their own advocates against harm they may experience. The clumsy banning of corporal punishment in schools, without the provision of a carefully crafted alternative arrangement that could effectively counteract this tradition, has left students, teachers, and parents at loggerheads about appropriate punishment regimes.

The increasing rate at which women are murdered also sounds the alarm for the assault of children. Shocking recently was the conviction of a woman for instigating the murder of her rival ,who was heavily pregnant. This reveals the disturbing ways in which violence may be internalised by those usually perceived as victims. In addition, sexual offences also often accompany the murder of children. In many of the reported cases of violence against children, the perpetrator may be a family member who takes his own life after killing his relatives. Inter-generational failure to develop a socialisation regime that creates an enabling environment for children and adults alike fuels the crisis that makes it possible for throat slashing of children to emerge as a scandalous new normal. It is worrying that the police have released the image of a woman who they suspect may have been involved in Danielle Rowe’s demise.

NATIONAL EFFORT

Many years ago, there was a national effort to address the deteriorating values and attitudes that create the mindset that provides an impetus for violence against the person – men, women, and children. Then prime minister P.J. Patterson, who initiated this programme, must be shaking his head at the dismal state of affairs where the social care of citizens in general and children in particular is concerned. Women are usually blamed for the breakdown in family values, social discipline, and the chaos that passes for citizen security.

The push factor of childhood parenthood is also often cited as influential in the failure of parents (usually women) to instil moral compasses in children. Women are often accused of failure to furnish boys with the resources to excel in the education system and avoid the beguiling pull of the gun and its power apparatus. Women are also blamed for teenage parenthood when it occurs although the “tie the heifer, loose the bull” cultural practice has been shown by seasoned researchers to be at the heart of this social dysfunction.

Despite the trend of male underperformance in school, this is not the whole story. Many boys are succeedingd espite the threats to their social stability. And many men and women have succeeded in their parenting and teaching tasks. Further, since Jamaica ratified the United Nations Charter on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1994, a raft of laws has been introduced to safeguard the rights of children, including the Child Maintenance Act (2006); the Office of the Children’s Advocate and the Victims Charter (2007); regulations governing Children’s Homes; Office of the Children Registry and Trafficking in Persons Act, which were also introduced in 2007.

The problem is that there is a glaring gap between legislation and social protection. The political will must be generated to ensure that “collective security for surety”, based on the trust that accompanies the building of social capital, is the driver of policy and practices governing the treatment of children. The village must be empowered to raise the child.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com