‘I accepted a jacket’

LAST year, Michael Larmond instructed his son’s Jamaican guardian to proceed to the US embassy to get a package to complete medical testing for his son, for whom he had made an immigration petition in the United States. Sometime after, Larmond, who’s using a pseudonym, was contacted with the devastating news: the boy he’d thought was his for 16 years was proven not to be his child.

With the boy’s mother having passed away two years before, there weren’t many answers to the questions Michael had. Even more worrying were the issues that the revelation raised. What would happen to the boy who knew no other father and who Michael had formed a bond with, and what were his legal options?

“After getting over the initial shock, I accepted it fast,” Michael said. “None of it was his fault, and we were already father and son in every other sense of the word, so there was no use crying over it.”

He said his next step, after “accepting my jacket”, was to contact his lawyer to try to find away to get the child abroad anyway.

The case is still ongoing.

Statistics out of the Family Court a few years ago showed that 34.5 per cent of Jamaican men tested during court proceedings turned out not to be the father of children that they were told were theirs. This figure is independent of those tested privately.

Last year, local DNA centre Caribbean Genetics (CariGen) based at the University of the West Indies, showed 1,100 men being tested with a large number proven not to be the fathers. The situation is so widespread that some persons have described Jamaica as the “jacket capital” of the world.

And while men are being given jackets that do not fit, some, like Michael, have elected to wear them anyway, especially if time has passed and they have become attached to the child.

Family Counsellor at the Power of Faith Ministries in Portmore, Tisha Walker-Brown, said there are many reasons why a man would accept a child knowing that he is not the father.

These include:

* A forgiving spirit: “It might be that the man has a forgiving spirit and has accepted that she made a mistake,” Walker-Brown said. She pointed towards the Bible story of Hosea whose wife went out and cheated and each time she did she brought home a child that was not his and he accepted it. This, she explained, was symbolic of God’s willingness to forgive, no matter how often we sin.

* True love: “Maybe he really loves the woman and that is why he would take her back. And so he could be saying, ‘let us work this thing out’.”

* He is impotent: “Maybe it’s a situation where he cannot impregnate the woman and he refuses to seek help or adopt, and the woman really wants to have a child. She then goes out, gets pregnant and he accepts it, knowing he was not in a position to give her what she wanted.”

* She is the dominant figure: “She plays the role of the man in the house and what she says goes. And so she goes out, gets pregnant and he simply accepts it because that is what she says.”

Most adulterous women who bear jackets, however, are often afraid to disclose the facts of the child’s paternity to their partners, especially if they are married. But whatever the feared reactions, Walker-Brown says women should seek to tell the truth about what has happened.

“Whenever he finds out, it will affect him. Whether she tells him now or she tells him later,” she said. “If he is going to leave her, whenever he finds out he will do so still. But if she tells the truth early, he might say she had the decency to come clean. A man will respect her for that and it may make him stay in the union,” the counsellor said.

Another reason for telling the truth is to free her conscience.

“If she has this to deal with, it will affect her in such a way that it will cause her not to give her all in the relationship,” the counsellor said.

Other reasons she gave for women to come clean with their partners are that if he finds out from someone else, the consequences could be worse, and when the child finds out that child may turn away from her and view her as a liar.

Lanny Davidson, founder of Fathers in Action, said when men discover that the child they have been supporting is not theirs, it impacts them greatly.

“It mash them (men) up and it mash up the children too and the families,” said Davidson who has over the years spoken to men who have unknowingly worn “jackets”.

He said statistics today shows much higher figures compared to years gone by, if one considers not only those tested in the Family Court but the number of men who get tested independently.

Legally, Margarette Macaulay, an attorney-at-law and women’s and children’s rights advocate, said if a man has any legal obligations towards a “jacket” it will depend on his conduct regarding the treatment of the child since his birth, within his family circle.

“If you have treated the child, cared and provided for the child as if he were yours or as if he (child) was part of your family, that may make you legally obligated to continue to provide for him,” she said.

“However, for such obligations to be legal, you would have had to have known that he was not your child at the time you made the decision to so treat him.”