IT WAS, we suppose, inevitable. We refer to the cynical use of Internet chat rooms and text messaging by adults to lure impressionable youngsters into lurid sexual liaisons.
After all, we have been observing these alarming practices through reports in the United States media in particular, for some time now. Now that it has been confirmed, locally, the question is, what are we going to do about it?
At a Gleaner Editors' Forum on Thursday Betty-Ann Blaine, that tireless advocate for the rights of children, shared several recent encounters about which she had been informed.
In one, a principal of a primary and junior high school in Kingston revealed that five teenage girls from her school, all under 16 years old, had been lured into having sex with a man with whom they made contact in a chat room. The sexual predator reportedly arranged with the girls, via the Internet, to meet at a busy commercial section of the city from where he proceeded with them to his lair.
Similar practice in the United States was given wide publicity by the cable network, MSNBC, which cooperated with the police in nabbing many of these sexual predators.
In those jurisdictions the existing statutes make it possible for the predators to be prosecuted for the preparatory steps they took via the Internet to engage in physical sexual contact with minors.
Are the existing laws in Jamaica adequate to
cover such practices? Or is there the need either to strengthen existing laws or enact entirely new
legislation?
These are questions that must be addressed as a matter of urgency, especially in light of the alarming statistics covering sex crimes in Jamaica.
According to the official figures, there were 746 reported incidents of rape in 2005, the vast majority of them allegedly perpetrated against young girls. Many experts agree, however, that these official figures are capturing only about 25 per cent of these crimes. A frightening thought, indeed!
And we should not have waited for outside agencies, such as Amnesty International (AI) to demand remedial or preventative action. AI, in a damning report this week, brought the problem of sex crimes against women and children in Jamaica fully into the international spotlight.
There is a great temptation to dismiss the report as yet another example of outside forces seeking to pick on Jamaica which, in recent years, has become all too enticing a target for such 'special' treatment.
We might even, in a moment of nationalistic fervour, be tempted to sympathise with that view. On the other hand, we have made it too easy, almost unavoidable, for them to set their sights relentlessly on us.
So rather than retreat into self-indulgent cries of us-against-them, let us get on with the task of cleaning up our act.
Law reforms, such as those mooted above, backed up by effective enforcement, might be an appropriate place to start.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
