Moms share their teen daughters’ nightmare harassment stories

STREET harassment is so commonplace in Jamaica that lawmakers have only so far come up with a Bill that will tackle sexual harassment in the workplace. Even in implementing this Bill, they anticipate that the highly sexualised nature in which Jamaican men have been socialised will pose a major threat to the law when it comes into play.

Associate counselling psychologist Rosemarie Voordouw, who chairs the Jamaican Psychological Society (JamPsych), in a recent forum at the Jamaica Observer expressed that, “Our Jamaican culture makes us accept sexual harassment more because we are highly sexualised. In some places sexual harassment is so endemic that it is considered the norm, and so if you come in and you don’t like it, you leave.”

Some women have become hardened to the harassment after experiencing it daily, ever since their adolescent bodies started catching the eyes of loose-lipped men, and have gotten to a point where they have accepted sexually suggestive comments as par for the course, as some men find it difficult to even greet a woman without a sexual undertone.

But not every woman will laugh off yet another unwelcome nasty comment from a man as she goes about her business, and mothers’ hearts ache when their teenage daughters relate some of the things that men have said to them.

They share:

Michelle, 37, store clerk:

My 17-year-old daughter was studying at her friend’s house while the friend’s uncle (who I thought was a decent man) was there watching TV. The girls were discussing their teeth, and my daughter said that she wanted to get braces because she had ‘buff’ teeth. He, in supposedly trying to reassure her, said, “don’t worry about your buff teeth now. Your man will love them when he realises that they don’t scrape”.

Alyssa, 35, customer care agent:

I have a big butt, so you can only imagine what I go through every day. But my daughter is now 14 and she is taking on a lot of my features, and she came home crying one night because a man on the road saw her in her uniform and started talking about how she shouldn’t walk by herself with all that ass, because she was tempting him to slap it up, and he wasn’t sure what would happen if he was under his liquor and it was a little darker.

Lucy, 40, skin care analyser:

I had just allowed my 12-year-old to take the bus home for the first time after going to get her hair braided. She would take the bus, get off at the gas station near home, then I would pick her up. When she got in the car she related that she was standing there waiting when a middle-aged man got out of his car and started asking her if he could take her where she was going, if she had a boyfriend, and when she didn’t respond, his words were, “If this was a different place and a different time I’d just take you away the way how yuh sweet”.

Camille, 38, nurse:

My daughter went to the stadium for a prep school swim meet, and she was waiting for me in the parking lot. She said a man approached her and asked her name and number, and when she refused both, he asked if it was because he was black, then if it was because he was too ugly, then proceeded to curse the 11-year-old out for being too stush and for not wanting a man like him. Mind you, she looks obviously like a child, and she said he had grey hair!