PM, see that no mother has to hand her daughter to any don

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Dear Editor,

There is an advertisement currently being aired in the electronic media by the National Integrity Action Forum in which a mother is hauling her barely pubescent daughter towards a don who poses menacingly with folded arms. To the terrified wails from the child, the helpless mother responds, "I don't want to, mi child, but he is the don and he sent for you."

The ad speaks to a reality in Jamaica for at least three decades. Over all of that period, Jamaica has had a standing army and a police force. Despite this, scores, or perhaps hundreds of mothers and daughters have had to endure that violation. It is to our collective shame, but more so to that of those who have ascended to the highest office of the land that such an outrage could have been tolerated for so long.

Our leaders should hang their heads in shame every time this advertisement is aired, and those among them who so gleefully embraced the title, "Most Honourable" ought to ask themselves whether they should in good conscience continue to do so. If the events of May 2010 prove anything, it is this. The only thing that stood in the way of dealing with that outrage was, to put it at the most charitable, a lack of political will.

At least in the end, even if it was because he had no choice, our then prime minister allowed the army and the police to do what was necessary.

It is a signal testimony to the double standard and cock-eyed reasoning of our self-appointed arbiters of morality, viz, editors, columnists, churchmen and loud mouths who either facilitated, tolerated or acquiesced to this abomination.

Mrs Simpson Miller, our current prime minster, has committed in her second inaugural speech to "right the wrong". Whatever she meant by this, I would urge as part of that exercise, that she resolves to begin a process of political transformation that ensures that no Jamaican mother or daughter should ever again have to be subjected to that abomination. That would at least go some way towards ameliorating our national shame and collective culpability.

Ansord Hewitt

Ansord1@yahoo.com