REFLECTIONS: Keeping it in the family

Some twenty-five years ago, or thereabouts, my wife and I commenced our efforts to try to improve things on the educational landscape of Saint Lucia. Inger had taken the decision not to continue practising medicine in our adopted new homeland but decided instead to spend her time visiting schools in the north and helping in any way she could with general health education, including sex education. She had asked a principal about sex education, about where children got their knowledge, and had been told, “They get in on the streets.”

Inger also asked kids what was the most important thing they had learned in school about sex. The children were unanimous in their answer: “No sex before marriage.” Only five of the children in the class of twenty-nine lived with parents who were married (to each other). Of the rest, several knew who their fathers were, but that was all. Most had very little contact with their fathers. Even so, the irony of the message, ‘no sex before marriage’, was lost on them.

When we first met, before she became a doctor, Inger was a science and gymnastics teacher. I was a writer of textbooks, at the time perhaps the most successful in the world in my chosen field with over 100 million copies in circulation globally. Much of my time had been spent promoting and, hopefully improving, education in developed and less developed countries on every continent. We believed we had the time, experience and financial wherewithal to make a substantial difference. At the age of fifty we gave up our careers and settled down in Saint Lucia.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. We are now both in our late seventies. After having devoted a quarter of a century, a third of our lives, in the service of education in Saint Lucia, we are left with the conclusion that it has all been in vain. Dear Reader, I am sure you have heard the expression ‘You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.’ Well, the situation in the Caribbean, and in Saint Lucia in particular, is not quite the same: You can bring the horse water and it will drink and drink and drink until your arms are aching from carrying bucket after bucket of the precious life-sustaining liquid, but once you stop providing it, the horse will have no water, lie down and die. But back to sex.

On one occasion, Inger invited children in Common Entrance classes to submit anonymously three questions each that they would like to ask a doctor. I had the job of typing out all the hand-written questions and sorting them according to topics. All but a small handful of the almost 2,000 questions dealt with sex, which is not as surprising as you might think, so there was little surprise there. What was astounding was the nature of the questions: The children had a pretty good idea about the mechanics and consequences of ‘having sex’, but, amazingly, horrifyingly, perhaps 80% of them dealt with incest and statutory rape. One child asked, “What happens when a man has sex with a two-year old girl?” She was asking from personal experience of her own family life.

On another occasion, Inger noticed that one particular child was either absent from school on Mondays on a regular basis, or came to school but was completely withdrawn from the world and simply unable to sit down. We investigated and, to cut a long story short, we discovered that this eight-year-old was being sexually abused regularly by her brother, one of his friends, and her mother’s boyfriend when he moved in on Saturdays and Sundays.

After much effort on our part, and despite a lack of interest by the Ministry of Education, we managed to get through to the Family Court to try and resolve the matter only to be told that the case was known to the court and had already been resolved. It seemed that the girl’s mother had a boyfriend who had a history of having sex with the eight-year-old daughter in between having sex with the mother. The court had issued an order banning the man from the house when the girl was there so the mother had arranged for the girl to be lodged with someone else on weekends (this might be where the brother and his friend entered the story but my recollection is not totally clear). Be that as it may, the girl, for whatever reason, had continued to spend most weekends at the mother’s house where she was regularly screwed by the boyfriend, so much so that she was either too sick to go to school on Monday, or too sore to sit when she did attend her lessons. When the boyfriend was otherwise engaged, the brother and his buddy took over.

The Family Court, despite the clear evidence presented, refused to revisit a case it had already decided. There was no follow-up. All the above happened years and years ago. Unfortunately, I doubt things have changed one bit. Saint Lucia remains a basket case when it comes to sex education, childcare, and decent family life for many at all levels of society, rich or poor, religious or pagan, educated or otherwise. It’s a mess.