MAY PEN, Clarendon — A Clarendon councillor has sounded the alarm that gang members are buggering young boys as a form of initiation then using the shame associated with the abuse to keep their victims in the clique.

Parents who may have knowledge of the abuse, she said, are too afraid to speak up.

“Criminals are buggering young boys to show their strength, and the parents cannot talk because dem a bad man so they use that to quiet the neighbourhoods,” said Councillor Tanyalee Williams (Jamaica Labour Party, May Pen North Division). “Some parents don’t even know what is happening to their kids. They do these things to recruit them into gangs so [that] they cannot leave, because they don’t want others to know what has happened to them.”

She called on psychologists and guidance counsellors to find out what is happening when children seem withdrawn in schools.

Williams’s comments came at last Thursday’s monthly sitting of the Clarendon Municipal Corporation during a discussion about the increase in sexual offences, especially among young girls in the parish. A concerned superintendent of police in charge of Clarendon Carlos Russell has appealed to predators to keep their hands off children. He began by speaking about the abuse of young girls.

“We are just appealing to the men to leave the little girls alone. We’re seeing too many babies that are being molested by adults and it is very distasteful. We’re seeing five-year-olds being molested by adults. We are also asking the mothers to be very careful who they leave their children with because, in some cases, it’s the same family members or persons living in the same household that are the perpetrators. So, mothers, please be careful how you leave your children and who you leave them with,” he warned.

His team, he said, continues to reach out to the most vulnerable in some communities via the Centre for Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (CISOCA) through lectures and sensitisation sessions.

Councillor Scean Barnswell (People’s National Party, Hayes Division) made the point that boys are also being preyed upon and they often suffer in silence.

“It doesn’t only have to do with girls because they [girls] will tell an aunt or someone else in the community, but the young boys tell nobody — and they live with that scar for life. Sometimes when they behave a particular way when they become an adult it is because of what had happened to them when they were a child,” he said.

Barnswell stressed that these are matters of concern that need urgent attention, not just lip service. He pointed to the financial reasons why a mother may ignore child abuse.

“The challenge is that we identify these issues, but what do we do after we learn about them? We don’t have the mechanisms in place to give the kind of support they need to remove them from that hostile environment to a safe place. Many times it’s because of an economic opportunity why they stay in the situation where the mother would pinch her and say, ‘Stop the noise. Don’t talk.’ Because if that person who is providing that level of livelihood says, ‘Leave the house,’ she don’t know where she would go with the three or four children. So while it is good to talk about it, we have to look at social protection for these people,” Barnswell argued.

He suggested that agencies of Government, such as the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) and the Social Development Commission (SDC), could come together in a multi-agency approach to deal with the problem.

“The police can only prevent certain criminal activities from happening, but outside of their remit we have to look at it from a different angle outside of just talking about it. Public sensitisation is needed. We have to start the conversation. When I heard about the killing of the nine-year-old in Hanover, it hurts as a father, as a parent, as a guardian. It hurts because these children are depending on us to protect them and care for them, and as adults you abuse their trust,” he stressed.