Glenda Simms A number of horrible incidents of the abuse, misuse and violation of the girl child have been carried in the local media. In one case, a mother in St. Elizabeth is alleged to have pimped her 13-year-old daughter for the privilege of having a piece of land on which she could build a shack to house herself and her other children.
On Tuesday March 27, Noel Thompson, a writer with The Gleaner's Western Bureau, reported that a St. Elizabeth woman allegedly 'knowingly' allowed her 13-year-old daughter to be sexually molested by different men in exchange for money and food.
The story elaborated on the fact that both the 47-year-old woman and her 27-year-old daughter who is now the mother of three, were involved in this scandalous pimping of a teenager who is both daughter and sister whose vagina was placed on the open market for food and/or money.
As the story unfolds in the justice system we might learn the nature of the types of food that were accepted for this bartered child's body parts.
It is no stretch of the imagination that these could range from patties and bag drinks to bun and cheese or a piece of yellow yam and a half pound of 'salt' fish. As for themoney, it is quite possible that two, three, or four hundred dollars might be the top price that the young men would be paying for the sexual favours.
Devalued by mother
After all, when a child is so devalued by her own mother why would anyone pay a high price for her? In the crass arena of the trade in girls, poor men will pay according to their means.
These cases are just the tip of the iceberg. In many settings - street corners, staff rooms of primary and high schools, church halls and rum bars - men and women are telling stories about similar cases.
In some communities citizens argue that these scenarios are not new. Women in their 60s and 70s now relate cases of young girls being farmed out by their parents in exchange for material gains.
Every time that these stories make the headlines in the local newspapers, many citizens raise their eyebrows and remark under their breaths, "these mothers are mad", and return to their slumber until the next bizarre story presents itself.
In 2001, Stephen-Claude Hyatt, a guidance counselor at Jamaica College and contributor to The Gleaner, produced the startling headline "My Parent and My Pimp-Child Prostitution in Jamaica".
In his discussion, Mr. Hyatt pointed out that in Jamaica "we have children who have been encouraged and even forced by their parents to sell their bodies for money and favours". He further argued that many Jamaican women have, overtime, been very comfortable with their teenaged daughters being sexually involved with men old enough to be their fathers in exchange for supplying the various consumption needs of the family.
Joining this cadre of "pimping mothers" are others who routinely "send their daughters and sons out nightly to work the beat".
When the dysfunctional behaviours of such adults are analysed, many of those who address such issues tend to blame poverty and lack of formal education as the underlying root causes of the ease with which mothers pimp their children.
I would like to propose that blaming poverty for all our sins is a shallow version of a more fundamental and deep rooted devaluation of the essence of human sexuality in the society.
It is the historical link between gender and sexuality that has informed mothers in all social sectors that it is normal for girls to be sexually exploited by men and boys. In the same stream of consciousness some mothers will, within a framework of what they consider abnormal, put out their little boys to make a bit of money through the use of their anus. In fact, at the deepest level of the psyche in a rigidly homophobic environment, such mothers know that their sons are merely playing around until they are ready to find a woman to be their "baby mother".
In order to deal effectively with this issue by identifying and developing appropriate and workable strategies to address the propensity of some mothers to sacrifice their daughters, policy makers, legal practitioners, educators, theologians and other related helping agents of both the formal and informal sectors, must ask different questions about the human condition.
Firstly, all those with a stake in the dismantling of the sexist, racist and classist mindset need to revisit the underpinning of the patriarchal blueprint which determines the life chances of the female of the species.
In a 2000 lecture on sexual exploitation delivered by Donna M. Hughes of the University of Rhode Island to the Queen Sofia Center in Valencia, Spain, the following proposals were put forward:
1.Women's oppression is created and maintained by the abuse of women and girls' sexuality
2.The men who control the commanding heights of the economic, political, and social sectors in all societies, construct the culture and enact policies that give them power to control all resources including the bodies of women and girls in both the public and private spheres
Interestingly, according to Hughes, on the one hand the theological arms of patriarchy subordinate and repress women's sexuality by placing a premium on girls' virginity and at the same time, linking the honour of families "on the sexual control of wives and girls".
On the other hand, the patriarch needs young girls to rekindle his ideas about his sexual prowess, especially when he reaches the twilight of the midlife crisis which is sometimes manifested in impotence and sexual dysfunction. When things appear to be failing it is the "girl to the rescue"!
Young men also create the demand for the female as a commodity. They want "ton load a gal" to rev up their macho engines and to feel like real men on their path to glory.
All this psychological baggage affects negatively the life chances of boys, girls, men and women, and it is within this framework that far too many mothers learn to undervalue their daughters' sexuality and commit the unforgivable crime of sacrificing the girl child at the patriarcha>All such women must face the courts of the land and they must be punished with the full force of the law.
Their daughters and sons deserve justice and freedom from sexual exploitation.
Glenda P. Simms is a gender expert and consultant.
