The heart-rending picture of small children marching on the streets last week in Liguanea, St Andrew, holding placards aloft, begging ‘Don’t kill us, let us live’, nauseated decent Jamaicans and dramatised the message that children are now prime targets for criminal violence.

But some psychiatrists and at least one criminologist are blaming parents for failing in their duties to their children, particularly in protecting them from violence.

The demonstrating children in Liguanea, like other groups of children before them, had gone to protest the killing of the likes of two-year-old toddler Sherene Smith, who, a post-mortem examination revealed, died in February after a severe beating.

Her stepfather, Anthony ‘Bunkas’ Green, is being sought by police for questioning and her mother has been questioned by the police in connection with the incident, which took place in Clarendon.

Baby Smith is on a growing list of innocent children whose lives have recently been snuffed out by heartless cold-blooded adults. That list included the four children – Jessie Ogilvie, 9; Sean Chin, 8; Jhaid McCool, 6; and Lloyd McCool, 3; all from the same family – who had their throats cut in St Thomas, also in February.

This month, Jordano Flemmings, a 15-year-old student of Mona High School, was added. Flemmings was stabbed by an unknown assailant during a robbery in Mona, sparking a demonstration by the school community, calling for an end to the murder of children.

Child psychiatrist Gillian Lowe, who is employed to the University Hospital of the West Indies, says the children have either been caught in the crossfire between parents and criminals in some instances or between criminals and the police, and are not being targeted in and of themselves. At other times, Lowe believes, they have been at the wrong place at the wrong time due to a lack of parental vigilance.

“I don’t think they are being targeted,” she says in an interview with the Sunday Observer.

Moreover, she suggests that there are other children who have no parents to take stock of their activities or to guide their actions, and so keep them safe from victimisation. On top of all of this, she adds, criminals no longer seem to harbour reservations about killing or perpetrating other kinds of violent crimes against children.

“I think a lot of these issues are pointing to a bigger issue – a lack of parenting skill. As a parent, you are the authority figure and the one responsible for the protection of your family, and I think those issues are being tested in the recent cluster of events that we are seeing,” she says.

“One of the main roles of parents is to protect their family and we put our children more at risk when we get into (certain) activities. I think it points to parents needing to take their role as parents more seriously. As parents we have to be so careful about what we expose our families to,” remarks Lowe, who also lectures in child psychiatry at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

“It (the knowledge) is not going to fall out of the sky into your head. We need to be teaching parenting and family life skills as a school curriculum activity. How is it that you learn to do math or use standard grammar? It is because you were taught in school,” she argues.

“Why should we think that parenting is something that befalls us? And many Jamaicans become parents when they are in their teens so they don’t know the finer skills and intricacies of parenting.”

She adds that countries like Finland, where there is low incidence of crime, teach these skills in schools, supported by a raft of social programmes catering to the young and old alike.

“I see children being the victims of violent crime as just another manifestation of the illogic of violence,” says Criminologist Bernard Headley, a professor at the University of the West Indies and the author of several books on crime. “They are a means to an end, obviously. They become pawns towards achieving some evil end, whether as retribution, for turf or simply more power.

“They are not targeted but have become the collaterals of war. It is a continuation of the illogic of crime and violence in which the borders of criminal warfare have shifted outside of Kingston, and have shifted into our sanctuaries,” Headley suggests. “Children are really collateral damage in a larger criminal violence experience that the society has been experiencing over the last couple of years.”

Headley says that “if one understands criminal violence as the core of what was being done, between groups, parties in the achievement of ascendancy, then we are now in a place where the group initiating violence will utilise children. And with society having ‘lost its innocence’ no one is safe, and certainly not children. It’s a larger picture of denigration and devaluation of each other”.

He, too, points to the need for better, more responsible parenting and improved family life as a requirement to effect change insofar as crime impacts children as victims and perpetrators.

“For the near and long-term, the profoundly most revolutionary activity the Jamaican people can engage in to defeat crime and violence is to raise strong families,” he insists.

At a time when families have been impacted by the forces of modernisation, Headley says, strategies are needed to counter the effects of social changes, including the absence of both parents from the household.

More particularly, women are no longer staying home as much as they used to, in order to look after the children, while men take home the ‘bacon’. Society must, therefore, find ways to fill that gap, stemming the effects of the new organisation of the family, the professor suggests.

“With the changes of modernisation, societies must provide adaptive strategies to deal with the absence of both parents from the home,” Headley reasons. “Things are happening on their own momentum that produces change in the society and we haven’t developed ways to deal with the essential issue of how we organise the family.”

Headley makes it clear, however, that this strategy alone will not effect the needed change, since it is the larger issue of crime and violence which must be tackled. The reality, he says, is that children are not the target of crime and criminals but rather the casualties of war.

Headley, like Lowe, calls on parents to be mindful of their own activities since whatever they do, more often than not, impact their children.

“Parents who become involved in risky activity need to know that they put their children at greater risk,” he cautions.

Dr Terrence Bernard, psychiatrist with Jamaica’s Correctional Services Department, agrees with Lowe and Headley that good, solid parenting was key to helping to safeguard the island’s children. Unlike them, however, Bernard believes that children are being targeted by criminals. He points to a new level of depravity existing among criminals as the explanation for this.

“In terms of targeting children as victims of criminal activity, I think it basically reflects an escalation in depravity of the minds of persons. This is not a psychiatric opinion but based on what I am hearing via the grapevine, some of these crimes are related to other criminal activities,” Bernard says.

“If I am, say, keeping a gun for somebody and things go sour and they can’t get to me, then they get to the family, which includes children,” he says. “The worse thing you can do to somebody is to kill his children. It is a reflection of how cold these people have become.”

williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com