Let children be children, Children’s Advocate urges

Children's Advocate Diahann Gordon Harrison is urging Jamaican adults to take full responsibility for protecting minors, especially schoolgirls, even if they display behaviour considered mature for their age.

"Even when they see a child who is quote unquote 'force ripe', as we like to call it in Jamaica, they should be directing the child away from that type of behaviour," Gordon Harrison told THE STAR.

Gordon Harrison was responding to concerns raised about adult men - including taxi drivers and conductors - pursuing young girls in uniform.

"This is an ongoing thing," she said. "We speak about age-appropriate relationships all the time. Our stance has been consistent, that children are to be allowed to be children, and that there is just something that is inherently inappropriate for a grown adult to be trying to be intimately involved or interested in a child, and a child is anybody under 18." The conversation has resurfaced following the recently publicised murder and sexual assault of two girls, one 14, the other nine.

Gordon Harrison also stressed that adults should serve as role models and redirect young people, rather than enable or dismiss inappropriate conduct.

"'That one gone through the gate is not anything, you know,'" she said, referencing a common expression used to justify predatory behaviour. "Our position is that adults are to be adults."

She called for Jamaicans to "go back to basics", reiterating that protecting children is a shared duty.

"Adults need to recognise that they're a part of the protective framework for children and that every single adult in Jamaica should be standing up to that responsibility," she said,

Highlighting the need for community vigilance, Gordon Harrison encouraged persons to report known abusers.

"If we have persons on both sides of the coin, whether male or female, who are pursuing youngsters, people in the community who know of these kinds of behaviours need to be pointing out who these adults are," she said, adding that silence or apathy contributes to the problem.

"If people in the community are seeing certain things and are covering it up, or condoning it, or saying it's not their business, it means that we'll continue to have a problem," she said.

She reminded Jamaicans that laws against sexual grooming remain in place and that encouraging minors to engage in adult sexual activity is a criminal offence.

"They would have really run afoul of the law, and consequences will flow," she warned.