WE ARE SURE that there are more than enough cases to justify the belief by some Barbadians that too many of the girls who are reported missing in Barbados each week are, to use the Bajan vernacular, just “wuffless”.
But to take for granted that this is the case with every child, or even the majority, would be extremely dangerous – and a grave error.
It is also clear that it is time we accept, as a country, that we have a serious problem. Yes, some of these teenage girls may be running to something, and very likely unwholesome practices that may not be tolerated at home, but we have seen the intimate details of enough of these cases to suggest that many more of them are running from something.
That something very often is abuse – physical, sexual, emotional, verbal and more. Unfortunately, many of our families are so tattered that even during their tender teenage years when the day-to day burdens of today’s society should not dominate their lives, these girls appear to be left to face mammoth personal challenges on their own.
Something has clearly gone wrong in our society and we are not coming to grips with it. Instead, these girls are inundated with an avalanche of social media abuse by adults who should know better, but who take a perverse pleasure in attaching some of the most hurtful and insulting labels to them.
We may all find it useful to engage in constructive debate on how we can identify the explosions waiting to happen in our households; why our secondary schools are staffed with guidance counsellors but these students will not confide in them; why the concept of family has become so skewed that a troubled teenager cannot find a single relative with whom to share her burdens.
Just last week the country was placed on notice by police that they were trying to locate five missing teenage girls from a single secondary school. Luckily, they were traced to a house in The City and recovered unharmed – prompting yet another torrent of abuse on social media.
Now we hear from a parent that she had only recently learnt that her daughter was raped when she was 11 years old. She had been showing signs of withdrawal from family and friends, chronic depression and had been engaging in self-mutilation for some time, enough to make the parent suspect something was wrong – but she had only recently shared the details.
We know this girl is not alone. We have heard the story many times before, even if the intimate details varied.
There is also the case published in yesterday’s Daily Nation of the 58-year-old father who was sentenced to one year in prison after being convicted of raping his 15-year-old daughter. We don’t know what antisocial behaviour she would have exhibited after that incident, but again it would have been so easy for the uncaring and self-righteous among us to instantly heap scorn on her – identifying her as just another wayward teen whose only interest in life was sex.
Unfortunately, in a number of instances, parents and other responsible adults who are confronted with these rebelling girls are totally unequipped to deal with them, and either don’t know where to turn for help or believe those with the authority to do so will be unresponsive to their needs.
We need as a country to take fresh guard on this matter, recognise it will take much more than the actions of police to bring it to a head, and at the same time exhibit a higher level of understanding and sensitivity than what we have seen in recent times.
