Professor Calls for Exposure, Prosecution, Therapy for Sexual Predators

Former Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office, University of the West Indies (UWI), Professor Opal Palmer Adisa, is calling on Jamaicans to stop protecting sexual predators.

“We must interrogate and break the veil of protection that teen mothers, their families and the community use to protect men. We must stop protecting these predators because [if] they do it to one teen girl then they [will] do it to six. It is a crime, it is dangerous, we have to stop, and men and boys must be called out,” she said.

Professor Palmer Adisa was delivering the Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation (WCJF) annual Pamela McNeil Lecture, titled ‘Adolescent Pregnancy: Breaking the Cycle – Protecting our Girls’, which was held virtually on Thursday (November 18).

She said that all men over 18 who are found to have had sex with a minor “must be outed, prosecuted and required to undergo therapy”.

“Until men are prosecuted, until men undergo therapy, this is not going to stop. We can have all the programmes to help the mothers, but we don’t want to help teenage mothers be more effective at being mothers; we want to help them continue to stay in school and not be the victims of predators. So, we have to create measures that are going to stop that before it happens,” Professor Palmer Adisa said.

“For me, therapy is essential. I don’t just want to throw away people because that doesn’t work. So just like how girls need therapy, men need therapy because they have been trained and oriented to believe they have a right to girls and women,” she contended.

Professor Palmer Adisa said that the cycle of teenage pregnancy can be broken by “not turning a blind eye, embracing every child as our own, naming, identifying and reporting predators before they prey on underage girls, and educating our girls about their body”.

The annual Pamela McNeil Lecture is named in honour of the WCJF’s first National Director.

It is delivered during the month of November, to coincide with the national focus on education and parenting – two pivotal cornerstones of the Foundation’s programme for adolescent mothers.