Question, Jamaica: Where do we draw the line when it comes to attacking and killing our kids?

Seriously, where? And what will it take for the rest of us to come out in defence of the children being attacked or killed?

Two stories this week caught my attention. One of them broke my heart. Fourteen-year-old Kayalicia Simpson was hacked to death while getting ready for school in what I believe to be an indication of the insanity that rages among us as a people.

The reports I read suggested that the child was getting ready for school when she was attacked by unknown assailants just outside her home in Newlands, St Thomas. I don't know of any motive, but what in the world could have motivated someone to hack the child in that manner, almost decapitating her? What kind of savage would do that? I say savage because that is what many of us have become - savages. We have become uncaring and unthinking. We act only on instinct, like wild animals.

They say it tells you a lot about a society by the way it treats its young, the elderly and the vulnerable, and what has been happening in Jamaica says a lot of bad things about who we are and what we have become.

Just recently, there was a feature on disabled children aired on CVM Television where we saw two schoolboys attacking a mentally disabled boy. Now, children learn what they live, children live what they learn, and these two boys who were attacking the mentally disabled boy are clearly exposed to violent environments and have already started to demonstrate that they could grow up to be just as savage as those who 'raised' them, and I use that term loosely.

The other incident occurred at a school in Parry Town, St Ann where the adult relatives of a child attending a primary school there visited the school and attacked an eight-year-old child who had been in a fight with the aforementioned child. So my question here is, what kind of person attacks an eight-year-old child? Are we nuts?

Have we become so dumb that we are unable to engage our brains before we do something stupid? I mean, so a child gets into a fight at school, as kids are prone to do. It's nothing new but you're first reaction is to go find the child who fought with yours and attack him? I would have thought that in the walk or drive to the school, common sense would have eventually tripped in and one of the adults would have said, 'This is not right. This doesn't make sense', and the plan to assault the child would have ended right there. Common sense would have prevailed. Having said that, I am very much aware that common sense is as rare as precious jewels, but in Jamaica today, it seems to be extinct like the Jamaican Coney.

Something is wrong, terribly wrong. It was just recently that a businessman in Westmoreland pleaded guilty to killing a 14-year-old girl whom he impregnated. The child refused to terminate it, I believe, and was killed because of it.

People are blaming the man, as they rightfully should, and he will serve a long time in prison for it; but are we to believe that this child's guardians were unaware of the relationship between the two? Are you telling me that no one cared enough to protect this child from this predator old enough perhaps to be her father?

You know, I would not be surprised if the case in St Thomas occurred for similar reasons. Why? Because this is Jamaica where nothing is wrong with an older man sleeping with an underage teenager - statutory rape - and no one says anything until it causes someone, usually the child, to lose her life.

You don't see that something is wrong with us as a people, something that needs to be addressed with the greatest of urgency?

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