Simms
Petrina Francis, Education Reporter
THE ONE-BEDROOM or 'quad' situation that is home to many Jamaicans is cited as the reason for our children's early exposure to sexual intercourse.
Speaking at a Gleaner Editors' Forum recently, stakeholders in the education sector pointed to a situation where students who live in one-bedroom dwellings are being overexposed to sex. This has further led to children engaging in early sexual activity, with many becoming pregnant in their teenage years.
"We have a scenario where unfortunately the quads don't seem to help very much and in the rural areas the one-bedroom system doesn't seem to help very much," Dorrett Campbell, director of communications at the Ministry of Education, said.
Quadraminiums or 'quads' are small studio units which are developed as part of Government's low-cost housing solutions.
Meanwhile, Dr. Glenda Simms, head of the Bureau of Women's Affairs, told The Sunday Gleaner in an interview that the one-bedroom living arrangement is not healthy for children. Like adults, she said children "need certain space and privacy for themselves". She added that this is not an ideal situation because parents have to wait late at nights before they can have sex and at times the children are not sleeping.
WATCHING PARENTS MAKING LOVE
According to Miss Campbell, when these children are supposed to be sleeping, they are actually watching their parents making love and this becomes a learnt behaviour for them.
Speaking with The Sunday Gleaner in a later interview, Miss Campbell stated that there are no statistics to confirm her claims but this is the reality especially in the St. Catherine (Greater Portmore) housing situation and "this is not the kind of morality that we want students to be exposed to."
She believes that the focus therefore should be on preventive methods through the school's curriculum and through the Guidance and Counselling Programme. The revised primary curriculum begins from the early childhood system and "we have also inculcated in that curriculum notions of a value system, family life, a sense of belonging, a positive self- concept, those are the factors, those are the values that we think will prevent them from making the wrong choices and will prevent them from peer pressure," she said.
According to The Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions, 3.2 per cent of the population has more than four persons per habitable room. This means that 83,200 homes have more than four persons living in one bedroom.
DIFFICULT TASK
Dr. Simms thinks that it is a difficult task trying to get around the one-bedroom situation because "rental cost in Kingston is very high". She believes that the only way to deal with this problem is to deal with poverty. She added that in a single-parent situation, the mother has to make sacrifices and choices. One choice she identified that the woman has to make is not to bring the man in the house. If she decides to go to his house, this poses another problem because the children will be left by themselves.
Responding to the question as to whether the one-bedroom situation exposes children to early sexual intercourse, Callis Thompson, guidance counsellor of Frankfield All-Age School in Clarendon said, "It certainly does". She explained that when some parents try disguise, it doesn't help because the children are very smart and they pretend as if they are sleeping and they really are not. She believes that the children are very curious and the one-bedroom unit contributes a whole lot to early sexual encounters.
To overcome this problem, Mrs. Thompson thinks that parents should "make better preparation for child rearing". She added that if parents know that they live in a one-bedroom home "you must know that you are not adequately prepared for child-rearing."
While one-bedroom housing is very common in rural areas, the level of poverty that exists usually prevent people from changing that kind of arrangement. When The Sunday Gleaner visited a community in Linstead, St. Catherine, one resident who lives in a one-bedroom house with her husband and two children said "it is not right (living in one bedroom with children) but wi cannot help it because only mi husband alone working."
Meanwhile, another resident in the same area who lives with her son and boyfriend in one room, said, "wi cannot do better". While she will not agree that her son might be watching her at nights, she said, "Dem pickney nowadays is smart and dem wi want watch jus fi si wey yuh a duh."
