THE Secret Gardens children’s memorial was created in 2008 to honour children who died in violent circumstances. It is located in downtown Kingston, Jamaica.

As proud as I am that my country has made the effort to honour our children who were murdered, I am just as ashamed that a monument of this nature is required.

We are not the only country with a monument like this. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany, has an entire section dedicated to children killed in the Holocaust. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum 9/11 Memorial has a section of empty chairs honouring children killed in terrorist attacks.

You will realise, though, that those two monuments are dedicated to children who were killed as a minority among the victims, whereas our monument is specific to children. Even the children’s memorial in Chicago, Illinois, is dedicated to the memory of 82 children killed in a particular incident in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in World War II.

Our memorial is for children we have murdered in ‘peace time’ in a country without a declared war, a recognised civil war, or an explanation as to why. There is no reason that one of the greatest nations on Earth has killed so many children that we require a memorial specifically for them. What is even more disturbing is that it’s full; there is talk of expanding it to accommodate more names.

Am I the only person who is mortified about this? We are planning to expand a monument that we erected for children killed by Jamaican citizens because the first one isn’t big enough. The existence of this monument is enough to make anybody ashamed. The fact that it’s not large enough to accommodate the slaughter is enough to make everybody angry.

After 40 years as an adult in one of the most violent countries on planet Earth (prior to 2025), I have come to understand homicide. I have even reached a point where I understand femicide. I do not accept it or endorse it. I am disgusted by it, but I understand the emotions and recognise the evil that allows it to be perpetuated.

I can’t, however, wrap my head around the process that someone without a mental illness goes through which ends with him killing a child. What creates a human being like that? That is often my question.

Some years ago, I was listening to a man ventilate his feelings — stating that if his children were killed by someone he would kill that person’s children. This was not some crazy gunman. This was a normal guy, whose family had been threatened.

I was disappointed that this person, for whom I had significant respect and regard, could utter such words. However, it gave me the opportunity to get into his head, to learn from him, so that I could understand what turns a man into an animal.

What I realised was that he was considering how he would react, based on the pain he would be feeling. I could see where someone going through pain like that could end up doing things that run counter to our instincts as human beings.

Would you or I, enduring a pain so great as grieving a murdered child, be capable of reacting by harming another innocent child? To me, that would only be possible if temporary insanity were a factor, and even then I can’t conceptualise it.

As a society, we protect children. This is a fact. In 1981 I was in the Bleachers at the athletics championships for high school boys. Back then we just called it Boys’ Champs.

I was, of course, a student of Calabar High School at the time. We were winning Champs. We were looking forward to seeing Joseph Boyd anchor the 4x400m relay to close the show. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. During the medley relay the Calabar High athlete tripped the Kingston College athlete, and a fight began. Then many fights began between several athletes.

The Bleachers erupted, with bottles being thrown by the dozen. The stands became a violent, dangerous battleground of flying glass. My female cousin Sandra and I were teenagers. A Rastafarian man used his body to shield us from the hail of bottles. He didn’t know us. We were minorities — racially speaking — and a different race from himself. He followed a natural instinct to protect children because that is who Jamaican people are.

Why then do we need a monument because we kill children? It’s totally counter to our culture. Think about it: Is there really any country with an inclination, culturally speaking, to kill children? There is none that I can think of.

We saw the Germans and Japanese display abject brutality toward children during World War II. In fact, one of the most famous pictures in the world is of a Japanese soldier with a Chinese baby on his bayonet. Despite this I don’t think, and am in fact very sure, that neither the Germans nor the Japanese are culturally child killers. So that would mean that the groups in Germany and Japan who engaged in wanton slaughter of children in World War II were behaving counter to the culture and values of their country.

Well, if this is so, those who disagreed were really quiet about it. In fact, there are books that suggest that the German population were Hitler’s willing executioners. I don’t really agree with that theory. There was prejudice and hate in Germany in that era but I think they were more victims of a totalitarian Government than actual advocates of killing children.

So in our country, is it that those who kill children are operating as deviants from our values just as those in Germany and Japan behaved counter to the values of their society? That is reasonable, but it doesn’t explain why we are the only country I can find that has a memorial for children killed by its own people in ‘peace time’, or at least without a declared state of war.

There are, of course, modern-day cases such as Rwanda, in 1993, where thousands of children were killed by normal people caught up in the euphoria of civil conflict.

Our situation, however, is not the result of a singular event or time in our history. It is a consistent occurrence year to year that is filling up the wall of the monument. I could debate all day, but neither you nor I would be able to understand why men in our country kill children. We can’t understand because we are not child killers, so maybe we should discuss how we can stop it from happening.

The only way I can think of is to have punishment that is specific to child killers, and make it brutal! That is, not just incarceration. Death, whipping, castration should all be considered as alternative punishments for people who harm children — not just those who kill, but also those who rape. The judges should not be bridled by the restraints of the region’s culture.

This is where we should visit societies outside the Pan-American region. We must look at what Asian, Arab, and African countries are practising. I have studied the penal practices of some of those countries. They involve the removal of limbs and sex organs, caning, and killing. These practices may not represent the most progressive penal methodologies for controlling crime. However, when you have a monument because you have murdered so many children in your country and the monument needs to be expanded 17 years after its creation, you must act.

You need to look at changing those penal practices to match the crimes, and bring about solutions to end the slaughter.

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