I share some common background with our clients – girls and young women – in experiencing childhood sexual abuse. From the age of six years-old it was a cousin ten years older who abused me. Yet I was always thinking that I was playing dolly house. At Eve for Life, about 75-80 per cent of our mentees have experienced child sexual… Read more →←
Author: Ross Sheil
A few years ago it was Eve for Life telling me that my life was not over. Today it is me having that same conversation with others, telling them, ‘Where you are right now, that was once me, but look at me now!’ Eve for Life has become a family to me where they have grown me from a mentee to a mentor mom and now I am a life coach… Read more →←
People at school are always surprised when I tell them I do taekwondo with Fight for Peace. But now I have a green belt and I help coach! What I really like about it is learning self-defense. You can protect yourself on the road like a lot of times I have to use it at my school, Camperdown High School. Students that are bigger than me… Read more →←
I feel good in myself when I can sit down and listen to someone who has a similar experience to me being in state care. Because what I have been through I can literally say to them – “I am you!” Yet, when I was going through those experiences I could not even imagine that I would be alive today, because I did have a lot of suicidal… Read more →←
I am a survivor of sexual violence. It happened to me when I was seven years old and living in Linstead, St. Catherine. My parents knew what happened and were supportive, but it wasn’t until I was in my thirties and living in Canada for school, that I felt comfortable talking about it publicly. It was at a ‘Take Back the Night’… Read more →←
I would like to tell you a story about a little boy called DJ, which illustrates the challenges that parents of children with disabilities and the children themselves have. At the age of two years, DJ’s mother became concerned about his speech. They visited their local health centre where his mother was told “boys are slower than… Read more →←
I was raised in West Kingston. Growing up where I did, I soon realised as a child that you got more support being deviant than being good. Good people treated you badly, and friends who were doing bad things also treated you badly. For any child who’s trying to be good in the middle of all that, life is going to be lonely. Most of my… Read more →←
Walking through the school gates, I am met with an abundance of yellow. Bright yellow walls decorated with colourful murals, yellow uniforms on children running back to class as a teacher calls out to them. The vibrant sunshine adds to the yellow glow everywhere, and I already feel warm inside. Suddenly, a small yellow-uniformed blur is… Read more →←
For years, I thought I had no one, and believed that my mother abandoned me at a bus stop when I was six years old. Now, a month ago, I finally found my family. Here I am on the phone speaking to this woman 26 years later, having had all that as the truth in my mind, and after all those years alone in state care. Here we are talking on… Read more →←
Working in child protection, one of the things that concerns me most are the messages that we give our children about safety and particularly, who is safe to be around. In Jamaica we have the “stranger danger” phenomenon where young children are taught that it is strangers that you need to be wary of. Yet, we need to open up a… Read more →←
