Melville Cooke

It does not take long for children to realise that the only thing that distinguishes them from adults is a few years. It did not take me long, certainly before I was a teenager, to figure out that adults have exactly the same problems and exactly the same desires as those who are considered, by age, to be children.

Granted, I did read a lot, but I was much less exposed to the external influences of mass marketing than a child who was born in 2000, for whom 100 channels of cable television is ordinary and many of whom are very comfortable with the Internet.

Even with the relative lack of exposure in my childhood, sexual experimentation among children was common enough. It was still remarkable, but certainly not unusual, not at a rural primary school with plenty of bush on its perimeter.

So, if there was this level of sexual activity among children in an era before sex was a widespread marketing tool for anything from shampoo to telephones to music, how much more is there to be expected now? Carnival, with all its glorious grinding, is on television, for crying out loud. Homosexuality is constantly in the news ('de tape' and all) and the classifieds are filled with penis and breast enlarger, stiffener and 'uplifter' adverts, along with massage parlour invitations.

Against this background, preaching abstinence to children to whom hipsters showing the cracks of their backsides are being sold willy nilly is futile.

Telling a child who sees their mother or father changing partners more frequently than they rotate tyres on the car is ludicrous (and they do know). I thought so when I saw the television ads about waiting (you know, the ones with the children on the playground and the girls having a discussion as the boys played) and it was reaffirmed when I saw the statistics on childhood sexual behaviour reported in The Gleaner on Saturday, June 30. They were a part of a report on Senator Donna Scott-Mottley's call for abstinence education:

"She told her colleagues that information available at the Ministry of Health revealed that 83 per cent of boys and 63 per cent of girls under 15 in Jamaica have already had their first sexual contact."

It is frightening. Very frightening, especially for those of us who have children heading into the target range. But telling children to abstain from sex when it is screamed at them from every television screen, from every speaker and in the behaviour of adults is simply not going to work.

Sex a need

Sex is not a want. Sex is a need. Heck, it is so strong that priests take oaths against it (and, apparently, for many it does not work). How early someone becomes aware of this need is not rooted into the age at which one is supposed to have become an adult.

Safety during sexual activity is a much better avenue to pursue. Scott-Mottley said: "I was very shocked when I read the statistics in the Ministry of Health that showed that so many young people aged 20 to 44 had died as a result of HIV/AIDS. It means that many of them would have had to be sexually active from the age of 13."

I am not enthusiastic about children having sex and I do not, of course, advocate giving a 10-year-old studded condoms to go along with their banana chips. But I do advocate them being aware of their safety choices, abstinence being one of them but not to the exclusion of all else.

In addition, the law against carnal abuse does exist and while there was no breakdown in the Ministry of Health statistics, I am willing to bet that many of the girls exposed to sexual activity at an early age were introduced by a 'big man'. When a child goes to hospital to have a baby, is the father investigated and action taken against him?

We cannot expect to give children the trappings of adulthood, from cellphones to skimpy clothing to access to late night parties, as well as leave them often to their own devices due to migrant labour, and expect them to behave like children in this one regard.