Sex monsters on the loose ... targeting children, majority of cases reported to the police last year involved persons below 16 years old

Tyrone Thompson, Staff Reporter

Figures obtained by The Sunday Gleaner show that of the 1,381 cases reported to the police Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA) in the Corporate Area last year, 1,034, or almost 75 per cent, related to children.

The children most preyed upon were those between the ages of 11 and 15. This age group accounted for 903, or 65 per cent, reported cases of sexual abuse.

Children between the ages of five and 10 accounted for 110 cases during the year. Even the babies, from newborn to four-year-olds (21 cases), were not spared by the predators.

"As a children's advocate, I am not surprised by the numbers because what you are seeing on paper is what we have seen on the ground," declared Betty Ann Blaine, convener of the group Hear the Children's Cry.

Easy targets

According to Blaine, the vulnerability of children in Jamaica made them easy targets for sexual offenders.

"This might be controversial but Jamaica is a country where it is extremely easy to molest or abuse a child, because of issues such as no supervision at home, poor parenting, not to mention the situation where you see little children walking to school by themselves, sometimes in bushy areas. It's like you can put a banner across the country and say if you want to abuse a child come to Jamaica," charged Blaine.

She argued that the low number of cases that had been cleared up by the police during the year and the small number of perpetrators brought to justice were also factors which cause this epidemic to continue.

"This is why this country has serious problems, because if the cases are not being cleared up, we don't know if we have repeat offenders going around abusing more than one child and getting away scot-free."

But head of CISOCA, Deputy Superintendent Veronica Gilzene, told The Sunday Gleaner that there are a number of reasons for the low rate of arrests and convictions in cases of sexual abuse.

"You have to understand that when abused
persons come to the centre there are many cases where they do not know
who are the offenders. There are times when they say they are taken to
locations where they don't know.

"They can't even give
you a description of the individual, and so in some of those cases, try
as we may, we cannot find the perpetrators," said
Gilzene.

However, she was adamant that despite
resource constraints, CISOCA would not give up on trying to find the
accused in these cases.

"We never push them aside, we
continue to investigate even though some of those accused continue to
elude us," declared Gilzene, as she agreed that the fact that 75 per
cent of the individuals who reported being sexually assaulted were under
the age of 16 was a worrying trend.

Gilzene and
Blaine also agreed that one way of reducing the attacks on the nation's
children is to educate parents on the importance of closely monitoring
and protecting them.

First line of
defence

"Parents are the first line of defence for
their children, so what we continue to do is beg parents to look after
their children and protect them. The State also has a responsibility to
properly investigate these cases and somebody must be brought to book,"
said Blaine.

In the Corporate Area last year, sexual
intercourse with a person below the age of 16 was the most common
offence reported to CISOCA, with 625 reported cases. This represented an
increase of 10.6 per cent over 2012.

There were also
347 reported cases of rape for the year, which was a decrease of 21 per
cent over 2012. Last year also saw 79 reported cases of cruelty to a
child, 85 cases of sexual touching, 59 cases of grievous sexual assault,
and 30 cases of buggery, among others.

Only 464
arrests were made during the year while 318 cases were classified as
'cleared
up'.