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SENIOR Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Sharon Millwood-Moore says errant parents and guardians should bear the brunt of scrutiny and blame when their offspring are involved in child-on-child sexual offences.
Millwood-Moore, who was responding to queries by the Jamaica Observer regarding the treatment of children under the age of 16 who are the aggressors in cases of indecent assault, incest or rape, said the solution cannot be to rush to outlaw them, given the complex circumstances.
"The criminalisation of some of these acts between children is one thing but it seems to me, as a society, greater emphasis has to be put on parents and families to take control of the children, because it cannot be that children are raising themselves and setting their own standards by which they will live. And as much as I am cognisant that it is difficult sometimes to do the level of monitoring that is required, it is nonetheless absolutely critical to the survival and the well-being of these children," Millwood-Moore pointed out.
She said children in conflict with the law is the often tragic end result of a total breakdown in parenting, or the absence thereof.
"You have so many children who, if you were to check the courts in a general kind of way, I often find it, apart from saddening, quite alarming that you can have children who are 10,11, 12, 13, 14 years of age and very often you would hear their mother explaining that they cannot control their child, that they don't know where their child is. That their child, especially [before the novel coronavirus pandemic restrictions], is not coming home from school, and even now, the child is gone somewhere or has left and gone to a dance or party and they have not seen the child in how many days," Millwood-Moore said.
"For some parents, especially mothers, this is almost a common assault where week to week you will hear some of them who will say sometimes if she leaves on x day she will be back by some other day, and you wonder to yourself if some of these young children are rearing themselves? Who is responsible for them? You have little children who are out there living the lives of adults because they are leaving their homes and going about their business, overnighting wherever they want and having whatever kinds of escapades or encounters they want, and come back home when they are ready," she said further.
"At the end of the day I am saying the society and parents have to take control of what is happening," Millwood-Moore stated, adding that on top of those challenges parents are at their wit's end trying to handle the access to inappropriate content and outright pornographic material by their children.
"You have some children who are seeing adults in their environment looking at this material, so now that they all now have to have a phone, a tablet or a computer device, which sometimes they did not have in the past but now it's at their fingertips, their very attendance at a class could require that they have something to log on to. The way that sexual activity and almost everything sexual is normalised in the lives of many young children, I believe that we are basically seeing the logical results," she noted.
The senior deputy director of public prosecutions, in the meantime, said pronouncements weeks ago by Director of Public Prosecutions Paula Llewellyn that the easy access to devices and pornography viewing by underage children is creeping into assault case patterns seen in courtrooms across the country.
"These are situations that are almost a formula for trouble, if not disaster. And remember, no longer do parents have this safety net of the school because at least during those hours of the day one could know that the children are properly within the supervision of the school authorities. So you have children who are not being supervised during the day with whatever it is they are watching or seeing and then God forbid, in the end, with what they are doing," she added.
She said Jamaica has been moving away from increased criminalisation of children who run afoul of the law, the most recent step in this direction being the passage of the 2019 Child Diversion Act.
The provision, which aims to reroute children from the formal justice system, preventing them from being treated as hardened criminals, introduces methods outside formal court proceedings. Among the offences which qualify for diversion are sexual intercourse with a person under 16, indecent assault, and incest.
Millwood-Moore, however, point out that the existence of this Act did not mean youngsters would not face the music where warranted.
"The lawmakers have already recognised that it would not be appropriate, if what is disclosed in the allegations of the complainant is a case of rape, to take rape and say you are going to refer to that as a diversion offence. It still has to be recognised that, though children, there are some situations where the criminal law really will have to take its course, and it really should not be that because they are children and really young children. Even serious matters that can sometimes bring real damage to the complainant should be allowed to go by the wayside as if it is not something important to the complainant because the question of how much sexual activity and sexual offences, particularly against children and involving children, is sometimes trivialised. I think it is really, really trivialised too much," she said.
Senior Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Sharon Millwood-Moore says it is quite alarming that mothers often complain that they cannot control their children, when sometimes they don't even know where their children are.