Child rights advocate and founder of Hear The Children’s Cry, Betty Ann Blaine, has bemoaned the fatal assault of 15-year-old Jamila Cole in Cotton Tree, Albert Town, Trelawny, and is now calling on Prime Minister Andrew Holness to publicly condemn the brutal incident.

The teen was reportedly raped and physically assaulted during a home invasion on Sunday, August 6. She succumbed to her injuries in hospital on Monday, August 7.

“Here at Hear The Children’s Cry, we are very distraught about this. We are sick and tired of hearing and knowing about the murders of our children. It has become a normal thing now and we have to be very careful that we don’t treat these instances as nine-day wonders. They happen and then we forget about them,” she said in an interview with Our Today.

She noted that perpetrators of child abuse believe they are immune to the law because they are oftentimes not caught.

“The problem that I see in this society, is that people think that they can abuse children and get away with it. They are not afraid of the consequences because oftentimes they are not caught and so there is a general feeling that you can murder a child, you can sexually abuse a child, you can physically abuse a child and nothing will come of it,” the child rights advocate said.

Blaine called for more stringent measures to ensure that child abusers are caught and put before the law to account for their actions.

“We have to be very stringent, the law must have teeth and these persons, these criminals that abuse children must know that they are going to be caught, they are going to face the courts and if they are convicted they will be put away for life and so that message must be sent across the length and breadth of Jamaica. That we are not putting up with this, we are sick and tired of this and you are going to be severely punished for this,” she said.

Work at the community level

While Blaine called on the prime minister to make a national address to condemn the brutal assault of the 15-year-old, she also noted that more work needs to be done at the community level to tackle the brutal attack on the nation’s children.

“We have to reach out to communities and to parents to encourage them to be vigilant, to pay close attention to what is happening in their families, what’s happening to their children, what’s happening in the communities. They have to be more vigilant. They have to be part of the solution,” she said.

Blaine noted that there must be a unified national effort to protect the nation’s children.

“We need to focus on what is happening in our communities where violence is concerned. We have a family life crisis in Jamaica and we need to find a way to reach families, to provide information to families, and to help them to organize themselves in communities. We need to form more community groups to protect children. We don’t talk much about the neighbourhood watch anymore and it was working, and so we need to focus more on communities and look at programmes for communities that can bring people together, particularly to protect the children,”

BETTY ANNE BLAINE, FOUNDER OF HEAR THE CHILDREN’S CRY

The brutal assault of the Trelawny teen is reportedly linked to a domestic dispute. The police are yet to make an arrest in relation to the incident.