Houses of horror

For example, one deadly incident was recently headlined: “Brother and sister die in fire.” (Dec 2) Police reported that the two children, a four-year-old boy and two-year-old sister, had been locked up in “the wooden, galvanised” house at Valencia while “the parents went out to do business.” Valencia councillor, Ms Simone Gill, lamented: “You can’t leave children that age home alone. You have to put things in place and make some other sacrifice to secure the children.” A few days before, the headlines screamed: “A barbaric death,” “Autopsy reveals Jenice beaten to death.” This was another heart-rending but intriguing incident about a four-year-old girl. The autopsy report said she was beaten to death with a blunt instrument.

(Nov 30) Not as a result of “eating French fries with ketchup,” as earlier claimed.

Media reported that the child’s parents broke up and she was left with her father, 33-year-old Robert Figaro, a woman and her two children. It was subsequently revealed that this four-year-old girl had been regularly beaten, left with visible bruises, and threatened not to talk about it. Horrific home.

The mother, Shana Charles, 30, expressed deep regret at not listening to her child’s pleading to stay with her. The child pleaded “Mammy, please don’t go, stay nah.” Shana said: “If I had known that she was being a abused, I would have taken her away from it all.” Horrific homes are nothing new to us. Would it surprise you to know that there is much more licks given to children at home than at school? For example, we recall our 2006 study for the Ministry; while 5% of the 2,800 secondary school students (anonymously) said that their teachers “physically hit” them as punishment, as much as 15% said their parents did so for the same offence (eg fighting). For the 17 other offences so measured, punishment at home was generally more severe than at school. This is not the first time we are pointing this out. Sure, the study was done in 2006, but we are convinced the situation with student violence and indiscipline has grown over the years.

Now child brutality goes in other ways too. At our last count, there were about 8,000 children left behind by imprisoned parents, especially the recidivists – with many left-behind children having to rake and scrape here and there. About two months ago, a father gave his 11-year-old son to drink poison, then poisoned himself. Psychological trauma also comes from children witnessing brutal violence and murders in full view. Such “children of war” seldom overcome the consequent neuroses.

Even knowing how viciously their parents got murdered is enough to inflict life-long trauma on many children. Just two months ago (Oct 10), two men ambushed a husband, 45, and wife, 53, in their Cunupia home, slashed the woman’s throat and left the man very badly wounded. Their two children are still sick with grief. Many such incidents in recent times – horrific killings, beating women, brutality on children – compel many citizens to wonder if the country itself has become a chamber of horrors.

One newspaper editorial called it “The war on women and children.” (Oct 6) As a brief three-month review reveals, there are other levels of growing violence and indiscipline among youth, such as the police, in a “shoot-out,” having to kill a 16-year-old boy just out from St Michael’s Home for Boys. A 14-year-old school-girl in uniform caught having sex with a pastor in a parked car. A group of secondary school students publicly beating up another student. A 16-year-old school male drop-out charged for murdering a 62-year-old man in a bar. Five secondary school dropouts (14 to 17 years) charged for cultivating marijuana. Then, maybe as comic relief, we had two teenage brothers, charged for obscene language and resisting arrest, claiming they did so because they were “bored with life.”