Thank you Macy...I will take and hold on to these words...

I still would appreciate hearing from others as well...whatever your feelings or dealings may be..

I wish there was a 101 course dealing with this shit as a foreign=ner in Jam country..
there isnt..i will go on my instincts and as always my empathy to help those who cant help themselves...but in a context as I find myself in...I know we got the same problems here in LA-but at least we have some sort of semi-instant response to the problem (ie calling 911,etc,etc,etc)No such thing in Jam...

This shit sucks..cuz as we all know,it ain't just a Jam problem....

This breaks my heart....And also the reason I do not attend my catholic church. Harboring Child Molesters!

Understanding child sexual abuse
published: Sunday | October 12, 2008
Heather Little-White, PhD Contributor

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20081012/out/out7.html

I found this article from 4 years ago

and Thank God I found this one today - there should be daily or at least weekly articles....

Silent Families Perpetuate Sexual Abuse Of Children
Published: Tuesday | April 3, 201220

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120403/lead/lead2.html

Meanwhile back at the ranch - I have been thinking about this a lot - for years and years - One thing people need to understand is that your reaction to want to kill or castrate (not a bad idea lol) the perps is a normal and most likely ahealthy reaction

HOWEVER - One must consider that these same perps are people sons, daughters, grandfathers , uncles, aunts , mothers, brothers and sisters. Lets not forget they are also their teachers, bosses, counselors, preachers, deacons, doctors and whatever else you can think of.

Incest is often generational - it is also something we are taught to not speak about - "If I tell the family Daddy is getting in bed with me and doing those things - everyone will hate him"

My first cousin told us about her father doing this one day when she was drunk in her twenties - that was the first and last time she spoke about it to anyone.
She didnt want the family to hate our uncle.- instead she distanced herself from us - I have not seen her in 30 years - we were very close growing up - She was 16 when he started - she felt she was old enough to say NO - so she blamed herself - she is an alcoholic - She is in denial -

I wonder if she kept her daughter safe - the odds are strong that she may not have - Her daughter is a grown woman and I dont have the pleasure of knowing her -

This is one little example of how deep this problem runs

I know for me, I was able to speak out and stop the cycle - however it took a lot to get to this point. I was molested when I was 8 -9 by an Uncle - I buried the trauma and unknowingly lived in denial with PTSD until my late twenties. When my daughter was reaching the age it happened to me my memories started surfacing. I discovered that the cause of my childhood epilepsy was sexual trauma -

I spent the next ten years reading every book and article I could find on the subject. I went to psychologists, social workers and group therapy - I studied this subject for six solid years and wrote all of my papers about it - I became a specialist . I spoke out publicly about it to try and help others. I worked with victims and I worked with perps. I was obsessed with this issue. I didnt miss a "lifetime" movie and i resad every self help book that came off the press.

One day - when my daughter was just 15, she was working at a family run arcade on the beach were some of my friend's children also worked. We lived at the beach and we were all like one big happy family - I was good friends with the owner. I was a single mother and he was very good to my daughter. He taught her to drive and he was helping her research colleges. He was a professor at UMass. He would take us out to dinner and I would have him over to eat at our house. My daughter loved Doug - he was like a father to her - after two seasons she was going to be a manager her senior year.

Now, here I was with ten flipin years of therapy under my belt and ringggggggggggg ringgggggg ringgggggg - we get a call and we are told that some of the workers who were getting the arcade ready to close for the winter came across a box of video tapes. It turns out the owner - our good friend had been video taping the kids in the employee bathroom.

It hit headline news and the word was out in my daughters High School. The other kids who were on the tape were all summer kids so my daughter faced this battle alone at school. She was teased about it - can you imagine how painful that was for her?

At that point, as you can imagine, my world fell apart. All that training to protect people and I wss still having a perp to my house for dinner. I allowed and encouraged my daughter to work for a perp.

I have spent the last ten plus years recovering from recovery.....
I quit social work - I went as far away as I could from it. All that education , all that work. I thought I was abused in order to help others. Hell I couldnt even help my own daughter. They all say dont go into social work to heal from your own abuse - I refused to listen.

A few years later my daughter won a little law suit and guess what she did - She brought me to Jamaica. It was my first trip. She knew I had been wanting to go there for as long as I could remember.

I saw the ramifications of childhood sexual abuse all around me in Jamaica. I had to work to block it out. I am highly sensitive and can feel others pain - I hate it - Ive learned I can't block that out. The only thing I could do was smoke a fatty and try not to think about it.

Well - I shared this story to help teach people that there are soooooo many layers to this issue - a knee jerk reaction is "kill the buggers" but that really doesnt solve anything.

The only solution that I know of is to - talk and educate - talk and educate - keep this on the front burner not the back. People will try and kill the messenger - people do not want to deal with this subject -the people who are in denial themselves will fight the most.

Get up stand up - stand up for the fight

I think somet of the irrational homophobia in jamaica could be rooted in childhood sexual abuse

for example:

I know a very intelligent Rasta whom I have had the most amazing conversations with - I learned a lot from this man - and i hope i taught him a thing or two..... one thing i could never penetrate was his homophobia - i did my darndest but his argument was always that he does not want someone to touch his sons - when i tried to explain the difference between pedophiles and homosexuality it fell on dead ears - However, I did learn that as a young boy he lived with an uncle that "he did things no one should do to a child" I think those were his most telling words. This is a rational Man with a very irrational fear of homosexuals...
What do you all think?

Last visit a Jamaican friend, her friend and myself were heading for Chances for a Oldies show. Crowds are really not my thing specially if I can’t sit but I agreed to go. We stopped at the Corner to get something to eat before the show. It was crowded and kind of rowdy. We got a bench against the building while we waited. There was a table with a couple old drunk sweaty guys and a couple of HOT Jamaican girls entertaining them. This one gal, I will call her Banana as she had short white shorts with a yellow something something underneath. Her hair was a site, tattooed up and down and let’s face it she looked road hard and put away wet. But she clearly had everyone around her attention.

A table or two away was a group of really flashy classy looking tourist with one proper Jamaican woman and her 3ish yr old son. Along with everyone else, this little boy kept his eyes on Banana. He would snuggle up to Mom’s leg and stare at her. All the tourist ladies found it cute. Someone then commented that this youth has a girl friend. This little guy got even shyer. Soon Banana noticed him and loudly came over and picked him up. He grabbed for his Mom but she pushed him away. While she picked him up he was panicking and she was trying to give him a kiss. She then walked inside the bar, I quickly got up and followed. Hell I was scared inside there with all the people and noise. She bought him a pop and came back outside. She wouldn’t give him the bottle until she made some nasty gesture with it. As soon as she set him down he ran straight to mom and to hell with the pop. This didn’t set well with me, got to the show and decided I really didn’t want to be there, told my friends goodbye and went back home.

This is a rational Man with a very irrational fear of homosexuals...

I too have tried till I was blue in the face on the fear of homosexuals comes from. As you say it's real (ha sorry) sensitive caring people that you can't even reason with them..Indeed..where does this come from?

As I said, for me I wouldn't be able to keep my mouth shut..it would just come out. I thank Macy for the FIRE idea..

I sat with 3 ja girls at Ossie's one night. They were talking about the news and such. I felt priviledge to be in on and contribute to this conversation. There was a guy who got caught "sexing" a 3 year old. The mother worked and BF stayed home with the little girl. These girls were all mothers and came un-glued and provided a very graffic description of what they would do to this man. Once the calmed down I found out they didn't think to highly of the mother who let a strong capable man stay alone with her child.

I read Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Boy many years ago. I have also read another author for many years who I think it is more relevant to this discussion- Andrew Vachss. While his Burke novels are a bit over the top, Vachss fights every day against pedophiles. He has been in the trenches for years.
Yeah Lola- the "kill them" "castrate them" statements are knee jerk reactions- my true reaction? Lock them up for life. Lock them far away from children.....

This is indeed horrific. This happens all over the world, but as the system for dealing with it is still in its infancy & not widespread nor widely utilized in Jamaica, the children there suffer horribly. Just like the animal abuse issue, these sorts of horrible acts are in the process of being dealt with. The Jamaican society must "push forward" along its course of dealing successfully with this. There will be "vigilante justice" & governmental justice, but the perpetrators should DEFINITELY be dealt with & not allowed access to the children, their victims!!

"Sharleen, I'm assuming that the Jamaicans of which you speak so highly of are those Jamaicans that you have met that are immigrants to the US or Canada...am I right? Maybe the Jamaicans in Jamaica, many surrounded by poverty & hopelessness have somehow cracked under the pressure of it all & have lost their conscience (some, certainly not all). I mean look at how commonplace murder has become. "

JaJewel, I still have friends who never left Jamaica that I have known since I was a teenager and I still give them high regards, though many have not had the opportunity to give their children the benefits of a higher education, they have give their children great love and taught their kids the meaning of integrity and some have, at great expense and hardship to them have gotten their kids through to an Associates Degree (two years of college) with hopes of their kids gaining a job within the hotel industry in JA.

I'm in NY so of course we had the Shower Posse all around here in the 1980's. Lots of murders, just cold blooded murders. Some really horrible scenes were played out with a total disregard for life.

I totally understand what you are saying about some cracking under the pressure of poverty. I have some friends here whose fathers immigrated years and years and years ago, working two to three jobs and saving money to get their wife and kids here. I hear stories of their almost starvation state of living, having nothing sometimes but mango's to eat, or just akee and their great jubilation when FINALLY they got visa approval. And their shock and disbelief of their first New York winter when the temperatures got well below zero degrees with a wind chill of twenty below. Some of them have since been deported, most usually on their second ganja charge.

I am very proud of the accomplishments of some of my long term Jamaica friends who probably migrated here around 1979. Most of them have children who are lawyers, doctor's, or have various Master's Degrees. Through their hard work (the parent's) and their kids too! Some of them plan on retiring to Jamaica really soon, some of them would NEVER EVER retire in Jamaica. They know too many retirees in the community where they were born who went back home and were murdered within two months of their retirement. Most of these that I hear of seem to be in the Manchester area.