Dear Editor,

Child month has just passed we can see Jamaica’s disregard and abandonment of youth coming to the fore. As the bodies pile up, as children become the cannon fodder of the battles we fight and the victims of the bitter society we have created. As a country living with no war or civil war, we pile up the bodies equivalent to a state that is at war. It’s not natural or healthy for children to live in fear, with death’s constant presence, murder and violence. Yet this is the fate of so many children in Jamaica. It should not be the norm to raise your children on bag juice and cheese trix, to leave them to fend for themselves while we party. Just like in war-torn states we build child soldiers; as young as 9-10 years of age children begin imbibing the romanticism of guns and infected with the disease of badmanism, and spurred on by the images on cable TV.

I have lived to witness mothers peddling daughters for dollars; mothers entertaining men who come to their 12-year-old daughters. I watch as some parents struggle, to no avail, against the libido of lustful taxi drivers and all kinds of community monsters that rear their heads, the characters who will try to employ their sons as “gun bags”.

Why are children in adult lock-ups? Why the constant Armadales and shootings of a little girl in a car by police? Why did a young girl have to kill herself in a male adult lock-up?

All this while the media doesn’t appear to be doing enough to combat the problem; not just highlight it, not just sensationalise and profit from it, but, as journalism is a pillar of democracy, then the media ought be an agitator for better. I remember a few months back Irie FM and social media made the most compelling effort to get back a child kidnapped in St Ann. I think she was returned in a day after Irie FM took up the campaign. And I thought, now imagine if the media steered the country’s collective consciousness in such a positive direction at all times, or made more effort to do it more often, where would we be now? But in less than a week, the criminals of this country have murdered over five children. I am still waiting to hear the voice of even one institution, such as Jamaicans for Justice. What kind of country have we become when there is no justice for the children?

Yannick Nesta Pessoa

yahnyk.blogspot.com