Nearly a decade ago, in the quiet rural community of Duanvale, four-year-old Natasha Brown was abducted while on her way to school and beheaded by her father’s ex-girlfriend, who placed her little body parts in a bag and dumped it into a 25-foot sinkhole the same morning. Residents recalled Marvia Patterson telling them it was a pig when they asked her about the contents in the bag.

On June 29, 2013, I journeyed to Duanvale, Trelawny, to attend little Natasha’s funeral. This event haunts me to this day. I still remember how helpless and shattered I felt viewing her lifeless little body in that tiny glass casket in the church. The congregation was inconsolable, and Natasha’s mother stayed outside the church gate.

Why would someone be so brutal to a child?

It was a question persistently asked of me and my team when I was Minister of Youth and Culture, particularly when I reviewed the horrifying reports of child abuse which came to my desk from the Office of the Children’s Registry (OCR). On average, there were 220 reports per week.

So what was causing this violence against our children, and what did we need to do to correct it?

MOVING AWAY FROM THE “A-NUH-MY-PICKNEY” APPROACH

When I would listen to many of the boys and girls in our children’s homes and places of safety, they were loud in expressing their feelings about the emotional neglect they experienced from their families. All of them wanted to feel loved by their mothers, but did not. “Miss, mi mother nuh love mi, miss,” was something I would hear constantly, and it troubled me. How could we make our children in State care feel loved and cared for?

We recognised that nearly half of the children in our State care facilities needed professional counselling to address the post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder, aggression, and depression many exhibited. Through the engagement of counsellors and clinical psychologists, we began assisting over 2,000 of them, 805 of whom were referred to the clinical psychologists and psychiatrists for ongoing treatment and/or medication.

This therapeutic intervention programme was essential, but it was only one aspect of what was necessary. We added education and public awareness programmes by physically meeting and speaking with community members and hosting parenting workshops in community centres and schools across the island to raise awareness about negative issues affecting children and encourage reporting. By the end of 2014, we had worked with and impacted over 1,500 parents through these workshops.

Furthermore, we instituted a best practices programme for our children in our children’s homes. The first was the Maxfield Park Children’s Home standards, which exposed the children to extra-curricular activities, mentorship, field trips, and music training to foster their development. In addition, we put systems in place and encouraged over 800 families to engage in foster care by opening up their homes to nearly 1,000 children. At the same time, through a bolstered Ananda Alert System and partnerships, we reduced the number of missing children, locating nine out of 10 who were reported missing.

Our interventions between 2013 and 2015 were impactful. So much so that by 2016 Jamaica moved up 52 places on the KidsRights Index to be ranked 51 out of 163 countries, proving the positive difference our programmes made to the children in State care.

However, we realised that, upon being returned to their homes, the abuse started again and we needed more social workers to manage, maintain, and sustain these efforts nationally. But we just did not have the resources.

Fast-forward to June 2022 and the headlines remain the same as our children remain victims of abuse, to include rape, neglect, mutilation, severe beating, and murder. Up to 2020, the National Children’s Registry recorded a range of 12,000 to 14,000 reports of child abuse annually, with 900 to 1,200 reports monthly.

THE IMPACT OF VIOLENCE ON CHILDREN IN JAMAICA

Most recently, seven-year-old Aiden Rose’s body was found at his home in St James with a wound to his head.

Homicide is the leading cause of death among adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, the mortality rate caused by homicide in this region is four times higher than the global average. (Violence against Children in Latin America and the Caribbean 2015-2021, UNICEF)

Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of children aged one to 14 in Latin America and the Caribbean experience violent discipline at home. These ratios are exceeded by 80 per cent in Haiti, Jamaica, and Suriname. There are approximately 800,000 children — roughly 30 per cent of the population — living in Jamaica.

According to the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), an average of 47 children are murdered annually, and 150 children, on average, have been victims of shootings over the last five years. Furthermore, eight in 10 of them between the ages of two and 14 years old experience some form of violent discipline — severe corporal punishment is five times higher among children from the poorest households — and one out of four Jamaican students aged 13-17 have considered suicide.

Even more horrifying, one in four adolescent girls aged 15-19 have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, and 70 per cent of our girls under 18 who have been victims of crime report they had been raped.

Surgeon general of California Dr Nadine Burke Harris concludes that if children are constantly exposed to this trauma, it can adversely harm their developing brains and bodies. If not addressed, it will affect their health as adults.

Post-traumatic toxic stress manifestations can likely result in children becoming violent adults. Therefore, breaking the cycle of violence in Jamaica must include, as a part of the mix, attending to our children’s psychosocial and emotional well-being in their daily experiences. No one is born a murderer. But, even with the billions of dollars we spend annually on education and remedial child intervention programmes, things are still going wrong.

Therefore, let us align the resources using a collaborative approach with measurable timelines and deliverables to address the problem at the source with the overall goal being to reduce violence in our homes and communities. Let’s begin with meaningful interventions within home and community environments. Additionally, we must invest in training the requisite number of child psychologists and counsellors to be employed across our schools and districts to monitor and evaluate our children on an ongoing basis. This would help and go a far way to stave off violent domestic conflicts, thus preventing their escalation within communities.

As Nelson Mandela aptly said, “The true character of society is revealed in how it treats its children.” Making a child feel safe and secure doesn’t just happen by chance. It takes purposeful will.

As a country, we must do better. It’s time to reset our approaches toward nurturing the development of our children and expunging violence from our communities with collective national commitment and proactive investment.