This is the fifth in a series of interviews with children who have been rescued by the Ministry of Human Services being published in recognition of Child Protection Week.
*Edith has never had a real place to call home, she is one of three children raised in a chicken pen which her parents moved into after a neighbour threw it out and then in an abandoned shack with no windows or doors.
The tiny shell of a shack sat in a fairly populated squatting area on the coast, open to the elements, but this apparently was of no concern to Edith’s parents who moved in with their three children and quickly had three more. It was not the life the little girl who was happy to move out of a chicken pen had hoped for.
“I didn’t grow up in a proper home but I didn’t know it was a fowl pen until someone in the area tell me,” Edith said bowing her head. Talking about her past still brings pain, which was etched across her face as she spoke about growing up under tough conditions and being forced into prostitution.
Edith is the eldest of six children all raised under conditions where her drunken father constantly abused her mother. The beatings were severe, she recalled, cruel bashings that left her mother battered and folded up in a corner for days. She said her mother would barely move except to drink water. Her mother struggled with mental illness and eventually was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Poverty is not a word to Edith, it was her life. She spent her days eating little and sometimes nothing while still very young.
She shared a single mattress with both parents and five siblings in the tiny one-room shack which she described as, “so small you could barely move around”. She had trouble sleeping most nights and recalled that the better nights came when she slept on a sheet on the cold floor, away from the mattress and her family.
Edith saw school as a way out of her situation so she completed her primary education and managed to secure a spot in a secondary school. However, her father had other plans for her which he later made known. He felt that she would be of better use to the family if she quit school and looked for work.
She then started to follow her mother around doing domestic work and later found a job plucking chickens. Employment came easily since, according to her, many persons in the village were willing to take on a 13-year-old girl instead of enquiring why she was not at school.
But they underpaid her, woefully. Her father soon decided to stop her from working as a domestic labourer as he had found another more lucrative use for her; she was to use her body to take money home. The child resisted at first, but had no choice as her father beat her when she objected.
“…When he tell me do something, I had to do it and the things he wanted me to do wasn’t nice things at all,” Edith said.
She was forced to spend her nights at the seawall in her community granting sexual favours to men in return for money, which her father took and bought alcohol.
Edith said, a bit ashamed, that most of the men requested oral sex. And things got worse when her father began to make demands for her to pleasure him in that way.
The child spent roughly a year of her life selling sex and a fair amount of grown men in her community participated in the shameful ‘business’ idea her father had come up with.
Edith said she learned how to cope with the situation by attempting to wipe out every experience by drinking alcohol.
The ‘business’ came crashing down one night when a resident of the area, unaware of what had been going on for almost a year, passed Edith’s family’s shack and chanced on a shocking scene. Since the shack had no door, the resident was able to see inside and observed the child performing an act of oral sex on her father. That resident immediately called the Child Care and Protection Agency of the Ministry of Human Services. Workers of the agency, led by Minister Priya Manickchand herself, stormed into the area, confronted the parents and removed all the children from the home.
Edith, who had started going back to school when her father stopped her from working in the day time, was at school when she was picked up and initially she could not understand why.
“I cried for my mother, not my father, cause I couldn’t see her anymore. I use to cry at nights when I came [to the home the ministry has],” she recalled.
She struggled to fit in at the Children Centre initially, but soon got attached to the place and the staff. She said she found comfort in the stories shared by the other children and eventually learned to live with her pain.
Edith is 16 today and she is focused on her studies, trusting that education will free her from a life of poverty. She thinks of her mother often, but rarely her father. She said that if he ever came close to her again she is likely to strike him. She has much praise for the child care agency saying that she now feels like a person, not a slave who was asked to do what other people wanted.
“I am going to get through this,” Edith said. “That is what I learn from the people at the centre and I believe them.”
Her determined spirit is enough to convince anyone that she really is going to be just fine.
Since the agency intervened Edith’s father has begged for forgiveness and has worked hard to nurse her mother back to health. Both parents are working on a farm today and have made major changes in their lives. The agency is now assisting them to build a home.
*The child’s name has been changed to protect her identity
