Afraid to face the truth

Yesterday I heard a short exchange on the radio in Barbados that raised my respect for some of the presenters. A recent Jamaican reggae song by Queen Ifrica is causing quite a stir. It's entitled "Daddy don't touch me there" and is about that great taboo subject, incest (and child molestation in general). It has lines like "Every day I have to wonder why my daddy had to be the one to take away my innocence". Apparently some attempts were made late in 2007 to ban the song on the radio in Jamaica (see report). What hypocrisy! In the same country that let's radio stations pump out gangster songs about shooting and murder. In the same country that loves explicit sexual lyrics, and goes wild when women dance "dutty w'in'". Barbados also has its head in the sand brigade as one woman called to complain that this was not the sort of song to put on the radio. The presenter said something along the lines of "Lady, you need to get with reality!" I guess if you listen to enough Crop Over music and see enough "wukin up" then you would believe that the world has no need to worry about about anything like child molestation.

This is a subject that people will naturally want to hide. Most normal people would put incest in the category of disgusting without much thought. I should have found some statistics before I wrote today but the subject was burning me. I was also put off by a news report from the US of a father who had thrown his four children (under 5) of a bridge to their death and now faces murder charges (see CNN report). Now that is child molestation!

A nice video on YouTube has Queen Ifrica giving some background to the song. A full video of the song is also worth watching and listening to (see below).

Most of the uproar goes to the subject of fathers molesting daughters, in part because we know that the male sex appetite can sometimes be limitless and faced with lack of access to sex with consenting adults (including prostitutes) quickly turns to predator behaviour on children--boys and girls. The standard story is that mothers are the worst culprits in covering up for this behaviour by fathers. I want to find what figures there are for this subject and come back to it soon. In the meantime listen to the song and heed the haunting lyrics.