Glenroy Sinclair, Staff Reporter
A Jamaica Defence soldier on duty along the troubled Mountain View Avenue yesterday. - NORMAN GRINDLEY/DEPUTY CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER
LAST SATURDAY, 35-year-old Dione Giscombe was chased inside a busy establishment on Gold Street, downtown Kingston, and shot 11 times by one of two gunmen. Two days later, another woman, Jashrine Reid, 23, and her three-month-old son were murdered on Jacques Road, Kingston.
That same night, gunmen struck again on Jacques Road, killing 37-year-old Celina Berry. Yet another woman, Nickiesha Walters, 24, otherwise called 'Miss Chin' was killed at almost the same time that night, by a group of gunmen who chased her along Upper Oxford Street, West Kingston, and shot her several times.
They are among a list of 119 women who have paid the price of an increasingly brutal society with their lives. According to police records, between Saturday and yesterday, at least six women were viciously attacked and killed by gunmen. Up to yesterday, the homicide rate had increased to 1,260 slain since the start of the year.
A KILLING SOCIETY
"Jamaica is now a killing society, but what is worse, it is a society in which vulnerable people such as women, children, elderly farmers working alone in their fields, spectators at a football match, are all victims," Hermione McKenzie, president of the Association of Women's Organisations in Jamaica (AWOJA), wrote in a letter to the editor.
"In 2002 your own newspaper exposed the rape and killing of females as a part of community 'wars'. Then, the women's movement called for serious State intervention to increase community safety, especially for women. Yet, here we are in September 2005, daily facing the same horrifying events, the letter said.
Ms. McKenzie expressed sympathy to the bereaved families and the shocked communities, and declared that "this letter is the first salvo in a renewed women's effort to work for safer communities."
In the meantime, Assistant Commissioner of Police George Williams, said the brutal killing of women in Jamaica is not a new trend.
"It is a case where the opposite gang or break away faction cannot catch who they want, so they get the closest person(s) associated with them," said ACP Williams.
RESPECT DISINTEGRATED
Joyce Hewitt of Woman Inc., believes that the respect that gunmen used to have for women and children has disintegrated.
"I think we need to unite. Everybody needs to come out and say enough is enough and demand more from our Minister of National Security. It is more than frustration, because there is no plan, we don't hear what they are doing to confront the violence," said Miss Hewitt.
Gender specialist and past president of the Bureau of Women's Affair, Dr. Glenda Simms, has described the vicious killing of the women as a frightening situation.
WOMEN TARGETED
"I have a strong suspicion that the women are being targeted because the killers cannot catch their men, so they kill the women instead," Dr. Simms reasoned.
According to Dr. Wendel Abel, a consultant psychiatrist, the killings are just a random process that reflects a general trend of violence in the society.
"It shows that the perpetrators are not discriminating. The trend has changed, some months ago it was children, then it was the elderly," said Dr. Abel.
While some of the killings are believed to be reprisals, at least one case, that of Dione Giscombe, is alleged to be a contract killing. She arrived in the island about a month ago from Brooklyn, New York.
