The alerts on my phone buzz with increasing regularity and the pattern has become quite plain.

Usually the girl missing averages 14 years old and the address is from an urban, inner-city setting. The first and most obvious conclusion to be drawn is that the child was reported missing by the adult directly in charge of her. Many of the households in these settings are mother-only households and one is tempted to also conclude, with no investigations and no evidence presented that familial problems – running the gamut from poor supervision to total breakdown in communication- could have spurred the disappearance.

Unlike well laid-out residential neighbourhoods in uptown suburbia where either the mother or father does shopping for food and grocery items (weekly or monthly), in inner-city settings where shopping for those items is directly related to the sporadic money available, it is common for a grandmother to say, “Taneisha, go a shop go buy half-pound a saltfish, two pound a flour, big gill a oil and half a bread.”

In addition, where houses in uptown suburbia have spacious living-room areas with television and bedrooms (also with televisions), in inner-city households the body count per household and the tropical heat make it almost mandatory for children to be “outa road” and in many cases, unsupervised.

About a year ago an international poll listed Jamaicans as one of the happiest people in the world. Uptown Jamaica, believing that all which emanated from its first-floor patio discussions was gospel-truth, scoffed at the reality of the findings. As far as better-off Jamaicans were concerned, poorer Jamaicans were happy only because they were uneducated and stupid. How dare “they” be happy when “we” have so many problems?

Again, the societal disconnect was brought to the fore. What the better-off, educated, reading, well-travelled, internet-surfing, Google-in-their-lives Jamaicans failed to understand is that poorer Jamaicans, like many other people in poverty on this globe, are forced to manufacture their own happiness. If they don’t they will go stark, raving mad.

So, the men go “outa road” to play dominoes under a streetlight, crack jokes over white rum in two-stool bars; the younger ones gather in groups and smoke ganja and watch the girls, the girls gossip and compare text messages while the mothers see it all and accept it as the fate of inner-city living. And of course, there is always the ultimate – the dance where man, woman and child go to lose themselves, maintain their sanity and throw their “happiness” in the face of uptown Jamaica.

Young girls living in inner-city settings come upon an understanding of the utility value of sex long before their counterparts in uptown suburbia do. Many do not have the benefit of brand-name high school tutoring and two-parent households, so they observe their mothers and her movements and know that with every new “uncle” the household will eat better in the coming week.

To compound the problem, many of the men who grew up in the inner city did not have the benefit of proper socialisation, either by way of a viable family unit or through a reasonably well delivered education process. So some simply do not know how to approach a woman in the search for sex. Having limited skills in this area, their focus moves to girls of 12, 13, 14 years of age and it is then that the problem catapults itself into statutory rape (where only a small percentage of men doing it are ever prosecuted) and into abduction, violent rape and murder.

There are many uptown men who visit downtown dances specifically to pick up underage girls for sex. It is the biggest open secret. It is not my understanding that this type of sexual predation leads to violent rape although, under the law, it is rape. What usually happens is that because of the poor supervision by mothers and/or the financial ease or benefit the mother believes she will get from the unholy and illegal union, uptown men indulge in sex with these underage girls and not only get away with it but are, in instances, lauded for “helping out the family”.

In 2003 I received a call from the headmistress of a well-known girls’ high school. She called the name of a well-known authority figure in the society. According to the lady, “He openly parks his car at the school gate and waits to pick her up.”

I called him and told him about the serious charges being levelled at him, and to my knowledge, he backed off. As far as I was concerned, if the headmistress knew of it, the girl’s mother knew of it and many in the school knew of it and none of them, with more evidence than I, had failed to report him, so why should I?

In 1988 the law of consent was moved from 14 to 16. If my memory serves me right, it was Ed Bartlett who piloted the bill through the House under the JLP government of the day. In recent times there have been calls to increase the age of consent to 18. To me, if the many men who are having sex with, and impregnating girls of 16 and under are hardly ever reported on or prosecuted, moving the age upward, downwards or sideways will only be an academic exercise.

In the mid-1990s I had a conversation with a 20-year-old uneducated man who was openly cavorting with a 13-year-old girl and having unprotected sex with her in his similarly uneducated mother’s house where he was living. When I pointed out the laws of the land to him, he said, “I wouda feel proud fi know seh I get AIDS from har dan fi mek another man come eat har cherry.” The ignorance was unbelievable!

It is, I believe, not entirely unconnected that a few months ago he ran a knife through a man and killed him and is in jail now awaiting his extended sentence.

The biggest disconnect in this society is that at one end we have our laws and at the other end, we have too many of our people who are poorly socialised in operating within these laws. I am not talking about a few people who, for stupid reasons or because they believe they could get away with a crime, simply committed it. What I am referring to is huge percentages of our people who have no earthly understanding that operating within the confines of these statutes will be to the benefit of the society as a whole.

Because too many of our menfolk, rich and poor, know that even those in authority will scoff at these matters and place them in the bottom of the priority basket, they continue to prey on young, inner-city girls, many of whom are themselves dismissive of their entitlements under the law.

We see nothing sacrosanct about the status of our young girls in Jamaica. If

13-year-old Janice Allen could be killed by a policeman’s bullet and nothing comes of it, if the Armadale fire could claim the lives of seven young girls and the society doesn’t respond in anger, what is the big thing about abducting another 14-year-old girl?

observemark@gmail.com