JAMAICA
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
By Andrew Lumsden, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
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On the night of December 28, 2016, police officers patrolling in the town of Santa Cruz in the Jamaican parish of St. Elizabeth, approached a parked car which had aroused their suspicions. Upon further investigations, authorities found 64-year-old Rupert Clarke, the pastor of a church in the nearby parish of Manchester, in what they called a “compromising position” with a 15-year-old girl.[i]
Clarke was arrested and charged with having sex with a minor in a case which has commanded attention as well as shocked the nation.[ii] Unfortunately, this appalling incident is only a small part of a much broader problem in Jamaican society: the prevalence of child sexual abuse.
“A National Crisis”
In 2014, Lisa Hanna, then the Minister of Youth and Culture, described child sex abuse in Jamaica as a “national crisis.”[iii] Between 2007 and 2014 nearly 17,000 cases were recorded by Jamaica’s Office of the Children’s Registry (OCR). [iv][v] The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) notes however, that “the available data does not necessarily reflect the actual magnitude of the problem” because the vast majority of incidents go unreported.[vi] In all, 40% of Jamaicans have said that their first sexual experience occurred without their consent and before the age of 16.[vii]
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