JANET fears for the sanity of her 12-year-old son. He only sits and stares off into space, traumatised from being raped in his community by a man recently released from prison. The rape, says his mother, was brutal, leaving physical injury. “He was raped badly,” she said.

The alleged rapist Roy Blackwood, said to be in his early 20s, was arrested Tuesday for the crime. It is also alleged by the community that Blackwood had earlier attempted to rape another boy in the rural St Elizabeth community and his own younger brother.

The community, upset that they had not got the chance to beat Blackwood, advised the Observer of the rape. They were upset that the police had whisked him from the area without their knowledge.

The police at New Market say Blackwood has been charged with buggery, but were unable to say immediately when he would face the court.

On Thursday, sounding confused, frightened, angry and in pain, Janet – whose surname and address the Observer is withholding so as not to identify her son – wondered at the callousness with which her child is being treated. The police came, she said, to take statements, but refused to treat her son “as a person.”

The investigator, she said, refused to look at the boy, and having advised Janet that he had to take her son to the hospital for an examination, decided he was too busy and called another colleague, a female, to get it done.

At the hospital, despite her insistence, Janet was barred from the room where her son was taken to be examined, with the off-hand comment: ‘Is police business dis.’

He was examined, but the doctor did not treat him, said Janet.

“Not even little medicine dem no give him,” said the distraught mother. “Suppose him have AIDS. Nothing dem no tell me.”

But he did get a brown envelope, with what Janet believes might be instructions but which she did not understand.

Her only hope at the moment is that the Victim Support Unit (VSU) can help her figure it out.

“Dem call and say me must come with (my son),” she said. She was to have gone Thursday morning, but having paid for medical treatment, Janet had no money to pay for transport into Santa Cruz where the local VSU is located, she said.