“Silence is the virtue of fools.” Francis Bacon
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
“Lying is done with words and also with silence.” Adrienne Rich
“No person is your friend who demands your silence.” Alice Walker
“Oppression can only survive through silence.” Carmen de Monteflores
“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” Robert Louis Stevenson
“It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.” Seneca

The staff blames the government for covering up many of the scandals associated with the Boy’s Training Centre. The government blames the staff for allowing indiscipline at the centre to bloom into a science. Management, both past and present, blames both government and staff for being slow to change and take action. If government and staff see eye-to-eye on anything, it is in their common belief that management is one of the major obstacles to positive change at BTC.

The blame game currently being played by the social transformation minister and the staff and management of the Boys Training Centre has its root invariably, one way or another, in the wrongdoing occurring under their own noses.

Over the last week, the STAR has been digging into the longsuffering of the Boys Training Centre. It takes more than one political party to create a hellhole like the Boy’s Training Centre.

One of the major scandals at BTC was the death of a young boy named Jamal Roberts who burned to death in one of the solitary cells during the last administration. At the time, government officials said that the boy was playing with matches in the cell and accidentally set fire to his bedding.

“But the government is lying,” said one staff member who was on duty on the night of Jamal’s death. “Jamal was killed. They (some other boys) put matchsticks in the padlock so we couldn’t open it. When one of the workers was about to enter the gate, they locked it and put a knife to his throat. Jamal was inside the cell and he roasted. No one had time to save his life. They threw kerosene inside the cell. They steal the key in the office and threw kerosene inside. But government told us to keep quiet. The government told us to keep quiet because an election was coming soon, so they didn’t want it to come out. If they found out any staff went to the media, we will go to jail. They said we cannot give evidence of anything to the media. There is a constitution at BTC that says everything must be confidential. Enough is enough. The government is lying to save their backsides but when we are walking on the road, people are saying it is the staff that is abusing and raping the boys. The staff is taking blame when the government is at fault.”

Did our source tell the truth? There’s no way of knowing for certain. The code of silence prevails.

Another hushed up incident was the stabbing of one of the three main “bad boys” at the centre. He was treated by a security officer he had recently attacked. Can we trust the source who told us staff members told the security officer to let the troublesome boy die, even while a Seventh Day Adventist security officer looked on?

The cover-up did not take much doing. Cover-ups are such a fact of life at the Boys Training Centre that staff members don’t even know the difference between being gagged and following the staff orders.

Another incident involves a security officer who was in the habit of patrolling the entire compound in the nude while on the nightshift. Reportedly, he would parade his nakedness before the boys in the dorms. In the mornings, while he was bathing, one of the boys would watch him and masturbate, with the officer’s knowledge.

“The boy would be jocking and wining when he was watching the man bathing,” said our source. “The boy was starting to act really gay after that.”

I am reliably informed that this incident forms part of Dr Seraphine’s report, still to be released. The same boy was also the victim of sodomy by older boys at the centre. His mother is a sex-worker. The boy was put in care and protection at BTC because his home life was hell. The BTC turned out to be not much better.

“We actually saw the older boys bulling him,” one BTC staff member told the STAR. “We saw it with our own eyes.”

The incident was reported to the social transformation ministry. “We were told that we were not to talk to anyone about it. They told us that if we told the press or anyone else, we could be fired under the staff rules.”

The boy was sent back to his sex-worker mother where he remained until the problems that sent him to BTC in the first place resurfaced. A court reassigned him to BTC, the same place where he was sodomized.

After Dr Seraphine was finished with his investigation, another rape incident occurred in which three older boys—one of whom was convicted in connection with a murder charge—abused a smaller boy who is there for care and protection. This was also brought to the attention of the ministry and summarily hushed up and swept under the carpet. Because nothing was done to protect the victim or to punish the abusers, the situation continues.

“They does make him suck them,” one of the boys told the STAR. “And if he don’t suck them, they does beat him up.”

Sources at the social transformation ministry have confirmed that these incidents were reported to them but that they will not condone the publication of the details because of the negative effect it would have on the boys and because the staff rules prohibit that.

The staff rules are meant to protect the boys’ privacy. However, in the absence of positive and immediate action by the social transformation ministry to transform BTC from a hellhole into a refuge and rehabilitation centre, the staff rules mostly serve as gag orders that encourage the kind of silence in which only the abusers are protected while corruption and crime flourishes.

Staff is frustrated at their inability to discipline the boys. Their ineptitude is compounded by the government’s negligence and their management’s impotence.

“We cannot do anything to discipline the boys,” a union shop steward said. “The boys throw stones, they threaten us, they do whatever they want and when we report it to management, they just write a report that nobody reads.”

Current management, however, is adamant that corporal punishment is the only way to discipline the boys and is demanding newer more creative ways of enforcing discipline from the increasingly frustrated and short-tempered staff members. Several former managers had no such qualms.

Earlier this year, a former manager reportedly asked staff to discipline one boy by putting him to sleep outside on a concrete slab. One staff member refused and called the minister. The staff member said that the minister told him he was on his way out of the island but he would commission an investigation when he returned.

The minister, Lenard ‘Spider’ Montoute, denied this, of course, but added that the former management often frustrated his efforts to find out what was going on at BTC.

“He’d just tell me everything was okay,” Montoute told the STAR. “That’s when I knew that I could not take his word for it.”

The latest incident was for Montoute what the recent WASCO strike was for Prime Minister Stephenson King—a wake up call to do what should have been done from the very beginning.

This week Montoute intends to blow the lid off several cover-ups which have plagued and haunted the Boys Training Centre over the last few years with a press conference discussing the findings of the Seraphine report. There are many people who are advising the minister against doing this, but Montoute told the STAR: “It has always been my inclination to discuss the findings.”

For almost a year, high-level government officials have discouraged the publication of the Seraphine report, but finally, the minister seems to have seen through the smoke. He will defy top advisors and government officials if and when he makes history by being the first politician to actually do and say something substantial about the lost boys of BTC.

“When I got the report on the investigation,” Montoute told the STAR, “many people reacted in a negative way, saying that we couldn’t disclose the contents. I was all for making disclosures, but they were more concerned about staff morale and stigmatization. But since the recent incident, there has been a cry for disclosure. My position is, you can’t be covering up for wrongdoing.”

The report has not been make public and in any event will not be released in its entirety. Senior officials in the social transformation ministry are still more concerned about “how it go look” than about what it takes to fix it.

Ending the cover-ups at BTC will not be easy. The staff themselves are often unwilling to participate in legal proceedings which would help in cleaning up the centre. The boys are naturally unwilling to talk about the embarrassing abuses. The management has no reason to have faith in any government’s promises when it comes to BTC.

Montoute especially has been criticized for visiting the Boys Training Centre less than half a dozen times in the three years he has been in office. And he has to fight his own government to get what is needed to fix the Boy’s Training Centre.

The social transformation minister got a taste of how hard it will be when at a Cabinet meeting last Thursday the health ministry made a presentation in which they spoke of the impending opening of a transit home for troubled and neglected children. The home has the capacity to house 22. When asked about the possibility of housing BTC’s non-criminals in that transit home, officials of the health and human services department flat out told Cabinet that they didn’t want ‘these boys’ there.