Violence Against women in Jamaica

The world paused for a while to take a stand against violence meted to women.Violence against women can be felt in many ways. In Jamaica today violence against women is seen in the manner in which women are portrayed and objectified in songs ,dances and videos.Male artistes publish songs and put out videos that show that women are nothing but sexual objects who must be ready at all times to be serviced by men.The most worrisome problem arising out of this abuse of women is that women are seen singing and dancing to these degrading songs as if the lyrics did not apply to them.Have they been conditioned to accept this image of themselves?What has brought men to think this way about women?This phenomenon needs to be addressed.

        BLACK WOMEN LOOK HERE NO!

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

In dese big modern days

You allow men to put you right back pon de auction blocs

Selling you cheap cheaper dan cattle.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Our beautiful young daughters turn beauty queen.

For de sake of a few dollars

Dem parade half naked

To please people who don’t give a kick about dem soul.

Beauty don’t rest ina your body

It spring from within.

Now to make matters worse

A rastafarian woman catch de master’s bait

And turn beauty queen.

Worse now all rastas feel proud

That one of their daughters go up de cattle stand.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Human trafficking keep you ina sex slave bondage.

Dem drug you, dem sterilise you

Dem sex you like you feel no pain

your body turn ina something anybody can use.

It use fe advertise goods from tooth paste right down to liquor.

Dem expose your nature to sell room ina expensive hotels

Exotic women, cheap sex, big money.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

You bleach up your skin

Too shame to be black.

You rather starve but you mus weave your hair

Dem turn you fool and have you doing de dirty wine till one day you pop your neck string and die

Trying to please men

Dat think say you cute.

Dem measure your legs, your wais, your breas

Dem make you wear some peak heel boots

Strutting yourself like you drunk

And tell you say you is” international fashion model”.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Since when you turn breeding machines

Fit to have baby for every man you talk to?

Sex come easy, first come first serve.

Feel no way, feel no pain.

Dis is what women fit fe do.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

What happen fe our struggle?

Remember we a fight to go forward not backward

Get an education, learn a trade, get a career

Check how many children you want

Make up a family: mother, father, children.

Raise dem to be future nation builders not criminals.

Put God ina your life,

Put some value on yourself

Stop sell yourself cheap

Remember say God choose woman to carry his children ina her belly

To raise and care and nurture.

Dat is something special.

Without it de world woulda empty.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Take charge of your life.

With de help of de Almighty

You can go through de whole journey.

So black women look here no

Remember say you were made queen of the world from you born.

Nobody can tell you different.

You don’t need no beauty contest

To tell you say you are special. 

Black women ,Black women,Black Women!!!

You don’t need no beauty contest

To tell you say you are special.

Black women look here no!

Conquer yourselves.

                 

A NEW VISION FOR CHILDREN “AT RISK” IN 2008

                                   A CHILD’S  DREAMS

A child’s dreams and aspirations

Lost in the midst of fantasies

Is the moulding force that shapes his mind.

The inspiring drive that forges

His fragile soul into greatness.

                      ********

A child’s dreams and aspirations

Brushed aside, futile,unimportant

Is the devastating force warping his mind

The troubled man of tomorrow.

A child’s dreams and aspirations

A man’s anger and frustrations

Crushing his soul to destruction. 

                   ************

     This poem is dedicated to the many young people who find themselves living in the margin of society. Hopelessness and helplessness fill their spirit and drive them to a life of crime and anti social behaviour.

                       ****************************

A new year has dawned and with this a surge of hope fills our spirit. There will be changes, dreams will be realised and mankind will be strengthened.

In my spirit, I nurture the vision of our street children getting back in the family fold, a better future ahead of them, ready to make their own contribution in the sacred task of nation building.

This vision will be realised when the government will mount a NATIONAL RESCUE PROGRAM FOR “CHILDREN AT RISK” and when society begins to see the street children as children of the nation who need to be respected , loved and set on the right path.

The society is saturated with fear and anguish over the crime rate and the government is trying desperately to find a solution to this very crucial problem.We as a people must go to the root of the crisis and take the necesssary steps to cure the ills that beset us as a society.

I personally want to focus on the shattering implosion of the family and the great number of street children left to fend for themselves. As responsible citizens of this country we have a moral obligation to give a helping hand and give to these children a chance to realise their dreams and fulfill God’s plan for their lives. Our silence and indifference will not protect us from the backlash of the neglect of the children of the land. Each child born in an inner city  neighborhood is born with the same rights and potential as any middle class child. Let us begin 2008 with a profound commitment to free the poor children from the grips of poverty , neglect , lack of education and skills to survive in the society.The unfulfilled dreams of a child will be the force that will destroy  him  and continue to fan the flame of anger,hatred and crime in the society.

Let us go through this new year with this motto in mind: For every child that we rescue is a future man or woman that we save. Each one take one for a better Jamaica. 

As I said in my poem the dreams of a child is  a seed set in his spirit by the Mighty Spirit of God and is the force that drives him to achieve.When parents and people around a child fail to provide the proper environment for the full development of God’s given talents the child is left open to frustration , anger that can drive him to self destruct.I am urging all Jamaicans to make a special commitment to rescue a child this year. Remember for every child we rescue is a man or a woman we save.

STREET BOYS IN JAMAICA

The Jamaican society is experiencing  a very crucial crisis,a phenomenon never seen before in its existing proportion: the total breakdown of the family.One of the many results of this implosion of the family is that an overwhelming number of children are left to survive on their own. They roam the streets and live in graveyards ,abandoned buildings and gully banks. They hustle to survive. These  children are victims of the most horrendous forms of abuse physical,sexual and emotional. They also experience on a daily basis the pangs of hunger and the pains of untreated illnesses.Initially, these children were boys who quickly joined the gangs formed by the dons. They were given guns and drugs;were used for sex in the most brutal ways and sent to beg.Now that the years have gone by they are young men who do their own recruiting.These street boys are ” children at risk.”In law they are entitled to care and protection. This procedure is done by apprehending the street children;finding their parents and taking the matter to court. The C.D.A. has the responsibility in law to apprehend these children and take the matter to court. Further to this step being taken the new Child Care and Protection Act demands that anyone who knows that a child is at risk has an obligation to report the matter to the registry located in the Child’s Advocate’s office.At this stage there are a few organisations that offer some remedial programs for street boys. There is one in particular that I would like to mention.This program is called the Possibility Program . This program which has been  very recently taken over by the Ministry of Youth operated from the Prime Minister’s Office for a number of years.It offers to at least 15 boys a remedial program and a skill training program. Very unfortunatley the services offered are totally inadequate and certainly do not meet the very crucial needs of the street boys. The boys attending the skill training center are functionally illiterate and very little is done to effect any lasting form of behaviour modification. After their stay at the Center many of the boys return to the streets where the gangs claim them once more. The reconstitution of the family having been totally ignored during their stay in the program they have no  other place to turn to but the streets and the gangs.

Now that the Ministry of Youth has taken the responsilibility of this program it is hoped that the program will be re-assessed and organised in order to provide the sound and effective intervention so badly needed by the street boys.

Street children are some of the most vulnerable and dysfunctional children in the society. They need the care and protection of the government as prescribed by law.They need to receive what is rightly theirs not charity and patronizing attention.

The Minister of Youth Babsie Grange is a woman of great courage and a defender of the rights of the people. I wish her luck in the work that  she will undertake for the welfare of the street boys.Remember that for every child that we rescue is a future man or  woman that we save. Our children are crying for love ,care and respect of their rights.Each one take one for a better Jamaica.

Poems dedicated to the many children who have died under violent circumstances this year. To Cookie a street boy who died under the gun.

OUR  CHILDREN  ARE  CRYING

Our children are crying.

Their tears as blood

Will stain the conscience

Of those who have abused them

Have trampled on their rights.

                         *********

Our children are crying

Tiny angels sleeping two in a crib

Growing up in a children’s home.

Deprived of human touch,of love.

Their piercing cries unheard ,never ending.

Their nightly lullaby.

     ************

Our children are crying

Their sobs turned into violent words.

Aggression slowly replacing their sadness.

Once brutalised and now brutalising others.                     

Teenage boys wiping car windshields, begging at street corners, rich men sex toys.

     ************

Our children are crying .

Young girls raped and abused

Having babies they conceived in hell.

Choosing to hang at the age of sixteen

Death is worth more than life in a government place or in a sex den.

        **************

Our young people are crying

Young men and women

Roaming the  inner city streets.

Dance hall queens,sex scenes, drugs scenes

Gun men,drug pushers

Wasted lives.

              ****************

Now ,we are all crying

The children’s cries now echo in the gunshots we hear.

Their anger turned into rage

Laughing at death;

Leaving behind a trail of blood

They now inflict on others

The pain they have always felt.  

                       ****************

          THOUGHTS   OF  A  STREET  BOY.

Sometimes I wonder… I search my soul and I wonder…

Are you the God that made me?

That blew his breath in me?…

Are you the one that put me down in a crib of hell?

The hell of poverty, disease and hunger.

Are you the same God that  lives in churches

Where preachers talk about you

Where people sing praises unto you?….

Are you the God that made me?

Left me to fend for myself in stinking ghetto streets

Abused, rejected, neglected .

Are you the one that put me down to sleep

in grave yards and gully banks?

Are you the same God that makes miracles

That changed water into wine

That calmed the waves and raised the dead?

Are you the God that made me

To feel police brutality

Although I have committed no crime?

Are you the same God that put bread on rich people’s tables

And leaves my belly empty day after day?

Are you the same God that heals the sick

But let my poor mother die just so?…

Are you the god that made me?

That will one day take back the breath you gave me?

Are you the same one that never blessed my life

Let me live in grief and pain

To die someday shot down like a dog?

Are you the same one that talks of love

But never sent any my way.

Are you the same God that lives in heaven

But will not greet me in yur kingdom

My sins too heavy for forgiveness?…
Or will you at the last hour

Pour some love and grace in my spirit

And embrace me at last as your very own child.

Philosophy of the organisation Mothers of the World.

Mothers  of the World is a non profit organisation whose main objective is to work with children and women.For every child that we rescue is a man or woman that we save.This is the motto around which the philosophy of the organisation evolves.

Every child in any given society is a link of that chain that represents the people , the society.

The weakness of this chain or its strength lies in each link.Let us therefore strengthen each and every link. Nurturing,caring educating and loving each child is the only way to build and strengthen the society.

From the smallest village to the richest mansion each child is a link with equal rights and equal  potential.

The government has a sacred duty and obligation to provide all that is required to equip each child with the necessary tools to forge ahead and make his /her contribution to the building of a better society.

Whereas the government can provide the necessary funds to establish programs for the care of children at risk it is a challenge to which  the women of the society must respond.Each woman can become a spiritual mother in her community.To oversee the care of a child or children ,to protect and nurture and open a heart of love to a child or children in the community  is  the duty of every  woman. Women hear the cries of the children at risk in the world and in our own society.Each one take one. Remember that for each child that we rescue is a man or woman that we save.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!