Trauma counselling for Manchester

BY RHOMA TOMLINSON Observer writer

Monday, May 09, 2011

MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Over the last few weeks, the parish of Manchester has been plunged into mourning. Two gruesome murder/suicides within days of each other left nine of its residents dead.

A third attempted murder/suicide left three victims battling for life and a parish reeling in shock with questions arising about the sanity of the parish's residents.

First, it was a police officer from the Mandeville-based Area Three headquarters who went berserk and slaughtered four members of his wife's family. Then it was a retired police officer from the parish, who murdered his girlfriend, her child and her child's father.

Then another man, a civilian, broke into his ex-girlfriend's house and chopped three members of her family almost to death.

In all three instances, the perpetrators — Wayne Llewellyn, Kevin Hollingsworth and Osbourne Whitton — took their own lives.

With the head of the Manchester Victim Support Unit Jennifer Hutchinson admitting her sparsely staffed office is overwhelmed, there has been a loud clamour for some kind of mental health intervention in the parish. Officials like Member of Parliament Peter Bunting and Councillor Sally Porteous have been calling for psychologists to be sent in to help ease the emotional trauma of residents.

But the call for more counselling institutions in the parish is not new. Churches and schools have their own programmes, but mental health officials have long maintained that this is not enough. Just last year, the Ridgemount United Church launched a counselling programme for children to help them deal with their emotional problems. At the time, persons were surprised to hear that children as young as four years old needed counselling.

Officials and residents themselves feel that in addition to the recent murder/suicides,the long list of crimes, including serial rapes, robberies, domestic violence and other gruesome murders afflicting communities in Manchester, has left scores, perhaps even hundreds, in need of counselling.

Here in Mandeville, the Community Counselling and Restorative Justice Centre (CCRJC) has been answering the call.

The centre, which operates out of the Rural Agriculture and Development Agency (RADA) building on Caledonia Road, has been offering counselling to persons across the parish for the last 10 years.

When it started, the centre, which is run by Northern Caribbean University (NCU), saw only clients who walked off the streets and into its offices. But since then, the CCRJC has broadened its scope to take in clients referred by the police, the Resident Magistrate's Court, Victim Support Unit, Child Development Agency, and the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA), among others.

Since July 2009, counsellors at the centre have dealt with over 220 new cases, in more than 440 sessions. This, centre officials say, was a big jump from the 32 persons seen in the previous year.

Of the new cases, 95 were from CISOCA,15 from schools in the parish,10 from the courts, while 25 persons walked into the offices from off the streets. The remaining clients came from the police, NCU, the probation office, the Child Development Agency and hospitals.

Director of the Centre Merylyn Campbell-Finch said of the 95 victims sent to them by CISOCA, 90 per cent were children, and most of them had been sexually abused.

Campbell-Finch said when she took over the reins in July 2009, she realised that many of these incidents occurred because girls, especially, sat back and allowed men to molest them "because they did not know how to say no, they were not taught to say no and feel good about it".

So the centre immediately developed a programme to help adolescents.

"We give them self-esteem training, assertiveness training... we look at verbal and non-verbal cues. We give them practical demonstrations in defensiveness, helping them to understand how to say no and let the men know they mean it.

"We go into the whole matter of dating and building healthy relationships... These were just very important in light of the rape cases referred to us from the courts and Victim Support Unit," she said.

She added that as part of the centre's intervention agenda, her counsellors implemented a programme for underage teenage girls who had become pregnant. But, for the plan to be effective, they wanted to reach the boys who had gotten these teens pregnant.

"We wanted to find 25 young men, ages 14-19, but we could not find 25 young men in that age range. We moved the age range up to 21, we still could not find 25 young men. We eventually went up to age 24... about 65 per cent of the men we got (the babies' fathers) were over 24 years, including a 14-year-old girl and a 55-year-old baby father," Campbell-Finch said.

Campbell-Finch said her team then realised that many of the teens were being impregnated not by their peers, but by older men. She said in the case of the 14-year-old and her child's 55-year-old father, "she (the teen) didn't know how to tell him not to (have sex with her), because he's an adult".

She said she also realised that much of the bitterness that was tearing families apart stemmed from a basic lack of coping skills.

"When we analysed the cases, we realised a lot of what we were getting was because of a lack of understanding. We felt that giving information to people would help them to better manage whatever crisis they had. We felt people would be less reactive and more proactive if they had the information."

So, she decided to alter the centre's modus operandi to focus not only on offering counselling to persons coming into the centre, but also taking the counselling sessions out into the community.

Campbell-Finch introduced a number of programmes designed help victims of abuse and community members in general which dealt with adolescent empowerment, family enrichment, male empowerment, child development and effective parenting. She said parents needed to be better equipped to discipline their children.

"Individuals tend to think of punishment as discipline, though punishment is reactive and discipline, proactive. So, by giving parents these tools and providing them with different methods of discipline, we wanted to teach them to be less reactive."

Emphasis was placed on helping the family as a unit.

"For example, when a mother and a daughter were referred to us, we realised that because of a lack of understanding by both about the developmental stages, they were not able to analyse each other's behaviour."

The CCJRC director said the Men to Men Empowerment programme in particular equips young men with conflict resolution and "life" skills, which "will limit the factors that would push them to risky behaviour and minimisze the risk of them coming here (to the centre)".

Her team hosted a Male Empowerment Camp to get young men to talk about their challenges and fears and to give them entrepreneurial advice, as well. Following the camp, the centre held weeks of individual follow-up counselling sessions, and each boy was given J$1,000 seed money to help start their own small businesses.

"Problems don't just come from out of the blue. They are usually concerns that lead to certain outcomes. For example, a young man has children, he's not working, it's not unusual for him to be stressed, become frustrated, and this may result in him engaging in unacceptable behaviour. So we try to empower him," she said.

She said the success of the Men to Men Empowerment programme in particular, has gained international favour because of its youth-at-risk component, receiving US$5,000 from the World Bank.

Campbell-Finch said since the first set of community-based seminars was launched in February 2010, well over 300 persons have been trained as counsellors in communities across Manchester, such as Greenvale, May Day, Albion, Cross Keys and Maranatha.

She says the parenting seminars in particular are especially popular within the communities.

"We have seven communities on the waiting list now. People are hearing about it and spreading the word. We often go out and give out fliers and meet with community players. Programmes are free of cost," she said.

But while the community seminars may be free to the public, they come at a cost which has been defrayed by welcome donations from a number of corporate entities, Manchester-based political representatives and the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica. This has been anchored in the financial support received from parent organisation Northern Caribbean University which has kept the counselling centre in operation over the last few years.

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Trauma counselling for Manchester