This story of Ariel Castro has me worried. Castro is accused of having imprisoned three young women in his home in Cuyahoga County in Ohio in the United States for a decade during which time he physically and sexually abused them.

This story is disturbing on many fronts. I mean, how is a man able to abduct three young girls, take them to his home, repeatedly sexually abuse them for 10 years, and keep his despicable actions a secret? Ten years is a long time to keep a secret such as this. It is even a longer time for a single man to keep three women hostage. Didn't he have visitors? And if he didn't, didn't the fact that he didn't strike anyone as being odd, perhaps even sinister? I mean what did he have to hide why he didn't want to let anyone into his house?

On the other side, the young women had to endure so much. It must have been extremely traumatising having to endure the repeated rapes, the physical and psychological abuse, the incarceration, and not be able to go outside for so long while knowing that freedom was so very close. One of the young women reportedly told the police that after her captor impregnated her, he hit her repeatedly in the abdomen and starved her for two weeks, causing her to abort the pregnancy. If these allegations are true, this is a wicked man indeed!

What makes this story frightening to me is that I can actually see this happening in Jamaica and with even more gruesome consequences. Each year, hundreds of children, many of them young girls, are reported missing. The police recently reported that many of these girls are 'spirited' away from inner-city communities to relatives in other parts of the country so as to protect them from the lecherous clutches of community dons, but what about some of the others for whom that is not the case?

The way we live in Jamaica today where we don't even know who our neighbours are and where nobody 'nuh business' with what is happening next door makes this environment ripe for sexual predators such as Ariel Castro to thrive. And from what we have seen over the past few years, Jamaica is chock-full of sexual predators. Every day you see sexually depraved men lusting at girls barely into puberty, so you have to wonder which of them is an Ariel Castro.

We are told by authorities that human trafficking does occur here. It is safe to assume then that some girls believed to have been victims of trafficking could be in someone's cellar somewhere, chained, terrified, starving, and bruised from repeated sexual molestation. At the end of this tortuous journey, they are then killed and their bodies disposed of in such a manner it would seem as if they never existed.

Every time I think about it, I shiver at the thought. I pray that it is only a thought because in this country where sexual perversion seems to be becoming the norm from the dancehall floor to the bedroom, such crimes are not a stretch for some demented imagination. I can only pray that it won't ever happen.

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