Violence against women: Betrayed by her own

Carlington Wilmot, Freelance Writer

Young girls in ghetto communities are like "birds in a cage".

There is nothing more depressing than being forced to do something that you do not want to do.

In the ghettos, many young girls are not able to choose their own partners. The area dons and their followers are the ones who do this for them. Whatever they say goes and no one dares oppose this.

Eighteen-year-old Stacey-Ann Willis vividly remembers the frightening experience she had at age 15. Stacey-Ann was forced to engage in sexual intercourse with four men and all four men were the friends of her brother.

What bothers Stacey-Ann more than anything was the role her brother played. She said he was the one who came for her while she was sleeping and took her to his friends, so they could fulfil their sexual desires.

Well-known badman

"I always say that what happens to some of the other girls in the community would never happen to me because I have my brother to protect me from being in such situation, because he's a wel- known badman," said Stacey-Ann.

The night when her brother took her out of the house she could not imagine what fate awaited her. It was only when she saw her brother's four friends taking off their clothes, that she began to wonder why they were undressing.

After they finished undressing two of them held her hands and the other two started taking off her clothes. She said she started crying and begging them not to do this to her, but none of them showed any sign of sympathy or act of regrets.

"I had to perform oral sex on all four of them and then afterwards they took turns to have sex with me," she said softly. "I always heard people saying that everything happens for a reason, but I don't see any reason behind all of what I have been through."

For the rest of that night she could not sleep because she still could not believe her own flesh and blood, the one who she was depending on to watch her back would let such a thing happen to her. Even her mother was pretending she did not know what happened to her that night.

Convinced

Now, Stacey-Ann is convinced there is nothing that young girls growing up in the ghetto can do to prevent being violated.

"When your time is near, you will know because when you are walking on the street, they swear off a you and pass remarks such as 'you a get big now'," she explains.

"The only way you can escape this judgement is unless you have somewhere else to run go, and if you don't have anywhere to go, you have to work with it."

Stacy-Ann said sometimes she felt like taking her life or doing something terrible to her brother and his friends because they are responsible for her unhappiness.

"All of my dreams took only one night to be erased and even though the Bible says that you must forgive and forget, this is something that will always be a part of my life," she said with her eyes full of tears.

Stacey-Ann is now 18 years old, she still lives in the community. As for her brother and his friends, one of them died in a gang dispute, her brother is now serving life imprisonment for murder and the other three are still on the streets.

Name changed to protect the identity of the individual.

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