The little children suffer

Now the children’s home founder, also female, is of course innocent until proven guilty and she must have her day in court. But the attitude of the caller is revealing — the pertinent issue, in what passes for her brain, is not whether the children were ill-treated or not. It is that the founder had taken on the difficult task of running a children’s home. This, for the caller, absolved the founder of any possible wrong-doing — even if she had, in fact, done wrong! And this is the kind of attitude that, to my mind, underlies the prevalence of child abuse in this place.

I would not think so if the attitude displayed by that caller was unusual — if, that is, the same attitude was not reflected in various ways at different levels of the society. I remember years ago calling a nun to get a comment on a news feature I was writing. The newspaper I was working for had that week broken a story about the principal of a Catholic school who had been transferred out of the country for sexually abusing boys in the school. When I told the nun which paper I was calling from, her response was, “I don’t like what you all doing to Brother —. You all should be more considerate of people’s feelings.” I remarked that the editors were probably more concerned about the feelings of the boys who had been abused. Needless to say, I didn’t get my comment.

In this believing society, the callousness with which religious leaders treat children is a major reason why abuse happens so often. One Seventh-Day Adventist pastor who writes a newspaper column continually rails against the United Nations’ Rights of the Child, seeing this charter as a major factor in societal breakdown (and, of course, a sign of the end-times). The Maha Sabha protested vehemently when the UNC government attempted to raise the marriage age for girls from 14 to 16. So did the ASJA, whose leaders want 12-year-old girls to retain the ‘right’ to marry.

These, mind you, are the same people who argue that a foetus is a child. But, now I think about it, that makes sense: since a foetus has no consciousness or feelings, the religious believers probably view a child in the same way. And this attitude infects the other institutions of the society.

In 1999, a senior magistrate who is a prominent member of the Adventist church, hearing a case of a man who had killed his three-year-old stepson, upheld the submission of a defence attorney that “A man is entitled under common law to beat his child” and therefore a parent could not be charged with murder for beating a child to death. The magistrate reduced the charge to manslaughter (though I am sure he was upset that the man had used his fist to kill the child instead of, as God orders in Deuteronomy 21:18-21, stones).

In 2001, another magistrate fined a 20-year-old woman $300 for lap-dancing. When, in her defence, the woman explained that her husband had left her and she had a two- and three-year-old to care for, the magistrate told her, “If you have strong morals, poverty will not be a problem.” (He did not, however, provide her with any recipes for cooking the Ten Commandments.) And, still in legal circles, we had the spectacle two years ago of the police hierarchy having cocktails at the swimming-pool where the buggered body of 11-year-old Akiel Chambers was found. And, lastly, this country’s infant mortality rate is 17 per 100,000 — higher than far poorer countries in the region.

Such institutional irresponsibility is shaped by, and also shapes, common social attitudes. A spokeswoman for the Emancipation Support Committee is on record as saying that it is better for a woman to kill her child than to allow him to “betray the revolution”. And when, some years ago, the stage collapsed at a Machel Montano concert, there were several women in the crowd so pregnant that, if they were Catholic, they should have paid for two tickets. And, as I have often mentioned, it is a common sight to see adults driving recklessly with children in their cars. In the final analysis, then, it is not poverty or unluckiness which mainly explains the abuse and deaths of children. It is callousness, carelessness, and indifference. And that is what we need to change if we want to save the children.

E-mail:

kabldeosingh@hotmail.com

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www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh