The story below, written by DONNA HUSSEY-WHYTE, I find heart-rending because this kind of situation is happening far too frequently and it is time that women put their children first over some crusty ass man.
GOING back to school last week was a welcome relief for 13-year-old *Oneil , a student at a prominent high school in Portmore, St Catherine. But it was not because he looked forward to socialising with his peers, or his anxiety to learn, rather it was to get away from home.
For the past two years, Oneil, who lives in Portmore, has had to see his mother’s boyfriend being given preference in his mother’s life while he has suffered verbal, physical and emotional abuse at her hands. He has had to spend nights outside while she slept comfortably in a warm bed with the man by her side.
Reports from neighbours are that while he has two younger siblings, seven and four-years-old, he is the one who is neglected and often left to suffer.
While All Woman was unable to speak with the child himself, when we contacted his father who lives in Kingston, he said he is angered by the way the child was being treated by his mother. He said the child complained and he has spoken to the mother on a few occasions without results.
“She put out the child three weeks ago and when the boy called me in the middle of the night and told me that he had to sleep outside, it burn me,” the father, who asked that his name not be used, said. “The mother and I are not together and she have a man there now that she love more than her own children.”
He said the child has complained about going to school without lunch money, and about threats his mother has made on his life if he made reports to his father.
“The little boy said sometimes he is there and don’t eat,” the father said. “If he goes to school without money she don’t ask him how him manage or anything like that when him reach home. The other night when she put him out, he found his way here from Portmore and not once during the three weeks did she try to find out where he was!” he said angrily. “Not once!”
But, he added, he feels that despite the treatment meted out to the child by the mother, it is still in the child’s best interest to stay with her, since it is not only closer to school in Portmore, but he would not be left alone after school.
“Most of the time my wife and I are not home, because I work on shifts and sometimes I have to work straight through the night,” the father said. “So he will be left alone and that is not good.”
Faith St Catherine, counselling psychologist at the Women’s Resource and Outreach Centre, said she has dealt with many situations where, because the men were the breadwinners and seen as assets, children were treated as liabilities.
“I have met women who don’t know how to love,” she said. “They never received love as a child growing up and so they themselves don’t know how to show love. Some of them didn’t want a child and so they will place the man before the child.”
She added: “She has no other source of income and so he becomes priority in her life and she becomes busy taking care of the man. So what you find now is that the man has become the asset and the child who is the problem, is merely a liability.”
She noted that it is such a common and unfortunate situation that a number of social agencies are looking at issues dealing with parenting.
“There are too many children getting caught up in situations where they are seen as a burden and not as the gifts that they are,” St Catherine added.
Another problem, she pointed to, is where women use the children as pawns to keep the men. As a result, if the relationship goes sour, they try to get back at the man by taking it out on the child.
One Kingston 11 resident says for years, he has had to feed four children belonging to a woman in the community who told him bluntly that she did not care about them because their father, who was living abroad, did not support them.
“She said it, but I did not believe,” the man said. “Every day the children used to come down to my yard and my mother used to give them food. They were hungry,” he said. “All of them wouldn’t come together but sometimes you see two come, then another time the other two and so on.”
The man said as a result the children were neglected and left to wander from home to home seeking food, hardly going to school.
“She wasn’t working and that made it worse, it look like she just take out everything on the children, because the man not giving her nothing.”
Said St Catherine: “Sometimes they [women] do it deliberately. Sometimes they say ‘if I do something to the child it will pain him’ [absentee dad].”
But, she warned parents, there is a repercussion and a consequence to bear.
“Children live what they learn. I am now hearing some older persons coming to me saying their child is not supporting them or paying them any attention,” she said. “Because they look at the child as an old age pension, which is a wrong thing. But they don’t realise that the way you treat a child has repercussions. It is a learnt behaviour.”
The psychologist recalled getting numerous complaints from children while in the classroom that they were being abused by their mothers’ partners. After complaining to their mothers, the children were asked ‘you think I am going to put him out because of you?’.
In fact, St Catherine said, sometimes these mothers would put out the child if they were old enough, and when they were too young, they would instead beat them for ‘telling lies’ on the men.
“A lot of children suffer because the mothers refuse to believe the child and will even beat them in turn because they don’t want to lose the man,” St Catherine said. “And so you find today that a lot of children are angry with their mothers who are supposed to be the ones to protect them.”
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