World - Jamaican music lifts lid on abuse

Nick Davis
BBC News, Kingston


Jamaican reggae star Queen Ifrica had a chart-topping hit earlier this year.

But despite the song's popularity among her fans, some radio DJs shied away from playing it.

The reason was in the lyrics. The track, entitled Daddy, had a powerful message highlighting two issues rarely tackled publicly in Jamaica - rape and incest.

As we sit chatting in a hotel bar in Kingston, Queen Ifrica launches into her song.

"Daddy don't touch me there, I'm gonna tell on you one day I swear," she sings.

Queen Ifrica says her work just reflects the experiences of people she has met.

"Just interacting with people who've been abused and seeing how much pain they are carrying round, especially the younger ones who are pregnant and say the baby they are carrying is their dad's - it's something you just can't walk away from," she says.

Queen Ifrica is not alone. Other Jamaican musicians are also keen to draw attention to the sexual violence that mars the lives of some of the island's teenagers.
"Music in Jamaica has been our oral medium, by which all sorts of comments on all sorts of social justice are made," says Carolyn Cooper, head of the Department of Literary Studies at the University of the West Indies.

The news headlines suggest it is a timely campaign. There was a 4% increase in reported rape cases between 2007 and 2008, according to the Jamaica Constabulary Force.

The island's laws are clear: having sexual intercourse with someone under the age of 16 constitutes statutory rape but fear and shame have contributed to far too few cases being investigated.

In the first nine months of 2008, the Child Registry, a state-run body that records sex abuse statistics, had heard of nearly 550 cases but fewer than half of those had been officially reported.

But the police are serious about tackling the issue, says JCF deputy superintendant Sonia Thompson.

Heart-rending

"Once a crime has been reported the investigation is begun," she says. "We take offenders into custody and then make sure the victims are OK by providing support to make them feel more confident."

Sex crimes made up nearly 16% of the serious crimes which the JCF has investigated so far this year.

Vybz Kartel, one of the best-known DJs in the dancehall music hall scene, has written a track called Raper to try to get people to talk about the issue.

"A lot of it goes unreported because people live in a community and the person doing the raping is a bad man, the victim is probably scared. It goes unreported but (you) have to make a stand ...against it," he says.

"'Cos it is a serious crime and people have a taboo against rape, (they) don't want to ask about it, (they) push it under the carpet but it's serious."

Queen Ifrica believes the more people talk about it, the more cases will come to light.

"It's so sad. There are so many stories I have heard since I did this track, it's heart-rending."