Despite taboo, incest alive in Jamaica

Incest, or ‘family ram’, is an issue that persons still dare not talk about openly in Jamaica and it is for this reason that the most vulnerable appear to not be receiving the help they deserve, experts say.

The Sexual Offences Act states that incest is committed by a male or female who willingly has sexual intercourse with another person, knowing that the other person is related by whole blood or half blood.

If a stepfather, however, has intercourse with his underage stepdaughter, it is instead listed as sexual intercourse with a person under 16 or rape.

Jamaica Constabulary Force Statistics and Information Management Unit data covering 2014 to 2018 shows that fewer persons are coming forward to report cases of incest. At the end of 2018, the reported cases had decreased by 58 per cent since 2014 across multiple divisions. Over the period, the total number of cases reported was 182.

According to Deputy Superintendent of Police Samantha Daley, who is in charge of administration at the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA), the stigma of being abused by a relative might prevent more victims from coming forward, although most cases are usually reported by the victims themselves.

“Say I am your father and I am having sex with you. You are going to be less likely to report me because I am the one sending you go school and I buy you what you need. I am the breadwinner in the house. So, you have those kinds of situations, but then you have instances where some persons can’t take the situation anymore and just say ‘me no business, if a you a pay this or that, whatever waan happen, happen. This nah go no further’.”

Said Daley: “We can’t determine what causes low reporting, but we can’t investigate until something comes to our attention, so either we are going to get a referral from the National Children’s Registry or the Children’s Advocate or a telephone call that something is happening somewhere and they want the police to check it out. The police really don’t know what’s happening to go and just check. We have to get information.”

A person who commits incest is liable on conviction in a Circuit Court to imprisonment for life while any person who attempts to commit the offence is liable on conviction in a Circuit Court to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years. Daley said one of the challenges in convicting persons has to do with limited to no information. “It is not unique to any one case but, with cases of sexual offences and child abuse, one of the things (that tends to happen) is that the Crown offers no further evidence as the complainant doesn’t want to go any further most of the time,” said Daley.

According to the data, Clarendon had the highest reported number of cases over the period, followed by Manchester and St Catherine North.

“Some communities are harder to police overall, not just in terms of incest or sexual offences, because people in there are not friends of the police and the police don’t readily get information and those communities are usually communities with higher crimes and wherever there are higher crimes, sexual offences number among the highest,” said Daley.

 

 

 

Little done to curb incest in rural areas, says social worker

Police data has revealed that the majority of the victims of incest are girls 10-14 years old. Of the 182 cases reported, only four victims were boys.

Clinical social worker Dr Claudette Crawford-Brown, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, said the incest data recorded by the police is surprising and worrying as she would have thought by now that the numbers for that age group would have much less, given the amount of exposure that has been given to public education campaigns. “This is what is worrying me, I found the same exact thing 10 years ago. That was one of the biggest things and, in 2010, when I compared that with other countries such as England, our data were almost twice as high. They are more exploitative of the little ones and that is unfortunate,” Crawford-Brown told The Sunday Gleaner.

“A society thrives when it’s able to protect its most vulnerable. Our young girls at 10 -14 age are very, very high risk because of the way in which women are treated from childhood, we haven’t get to the point yet where women are respected. Children do not have the emotional or intellectual maturity to be able to say ‘no’, to be assertive. There are little boys who will fight back, the girls are less likely to do that.” Crawford-Brown said a possible reason for rural areas showing more incest cases than urban areas might have to do with the exposure that the rural child would not have to public education initiatives.

“Very little work is done in rural schools. We tend to, with our social interventions, focus a lot on our urban areas and leave our rural areas to catch up and, when the fungus spreads, we go ‘Oh my gosh, we haven’t done any work in Clarendon, we haven’t done any work in Manchester’,” she said.

“Clarendon is one of the most prevalent areas for community violence and so it doesn’t surprise me that sexual abuse in Clarendon and Manchester is rampant because we haven’t done very many programmes outside of Kingston which are funded by our multilaterals in those areas. We tend to focus on our urban areas, that’s a fact of social service delivery in Jamaica generally.”

The underreporting and hiding of information related to incest is also not new to Crawford-Brown.

“Because the problem of sexual abuse and incest is always being described as an iceberg in that the reported cases are always smaller than the amount of underreported cases, because of the nature of it, because its associated with shame. The nature of it is one that is still in secrecy and shame, they are going to be large numbers of children who have been sexually abused who will not speak about it. Culturally children are not believed when they talk about incest. Now, in a lot of cases, the mothers know that the incest takes place but they are not prepared to believe their child in exchange for the economic inflows from the abuser,” she said. “Sometimes the one member that reports it gets attacked by the family. That’s one of the problems we find in the Caribbean, with all of the sensitisation there is still a desire to protect the perpetrator once it’s in the family and that is something we have to get over. I have also worked with Jamaican families overseas and found out that the Jamaican overseas families react differently to sexual abuse than the American families and it has to do with those kinds of cultural norms,” said Crawford-Brown.

The data from the JCF showed the perpetrators of incest to be between 35 to 49 years old.

Though 100 per cent of the recorded cases involved male perpetrators, the police acknowledged that the law allows for females to be charged and Crawford-Brown said she has heard of cases involving activities between mothers and daughters.

The data also shows that the number of perpetrators being caught has decreased by 45 per cent.

 

Cases remain secret despite pregnancies, STDs

Though pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections have been known to result from incest, these occurrences have also remained under a veil of secrecy.

“To a large extent, we wouldn’t know, they wouldn’t tell, the culture of silence is heavy on that one. The girls would not readily tell us, whether or not they got pregnant by that type of situation,” Executive Director of the Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation (WCJF) Dr Zoe Simpson told The Sunday Gleaner.

The Centre allows adolescent mothers a chance to continue their education during pregnancy.

Clinical social worker Dr Claudette Crawford-Brown added that victims of sexual abuse, especially incest, were likely to experience some form of mental illness and it is imperative that they get the help they need, especially therapy.

“You have people who were sexually abused and they don’t become mentally ill. What makes the difference with incest is you find that the closer the person is to the victim, the more damage it does to the victim, particularly if it’s a child. If you are sexually abuse by your family member, you are going to be experiencing the worst possible consequences of that abuse, so we find in working therapeutically with these individuals that those are the persons who tend to get the most emotional,” Crawford-Brown said. The police say they also ensure support is provided for victims of incest but they will only access these resources if they report the matter.

“Children victims are referred to The Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) for assessment to see if the incident affected them and if they can testify and they’re also referred to the Victim Support Division for counseling,” said Deputy Superintendent of Police Samantha Daley, who is in charge of administration at the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse.

Crawford-Brown said she wants to see more help being offered to children, so their voices can be heard.

“I would say that a lot has been done, since more than two decades ago, in sensitising the society to the problems of child sexual abuse. Where I would like it to go is to be able to have a hotline. Until you do that and have opportunities for children to speak directly to somebody who can help them, I will not be convinced that the children’s side of it has been addressed,” said Crawford-Brown.

carlene.davis@gleanerjm.com

INCEST FACTS

 

- Incest is committed by a male or female person who willingly has sexual intercourse with another person knowing that the other person is related by whole blood or half blood.

 

- Fewer persons are coming forward to report cases of incest. Fewer persons are being caught.

 

- Clarendon had the highest reported number of cases followed by Manchester and St Catherine North.

 

- Victims are generally girls 10-14 years old.

 

- Perpetrators are generally males 35 to 49 years old.