I see where the police are proposing to start talking about "Good Touch Bad Touch" to children. This is good. About 20 years too late but better late than never, the claim of third-rate societies. If this is another manifestation of the Commissioner of Police's 21st century policing initiative, then I am all for it. It would be good to see some 21st century trade union thinking from the Police Service Social and Welfare Association. We are all tired of this senseless resistance for resistance's sake or to look good in the evening news. As Attillah Springer says, that's one of the few times we can see ourselves portrayed on local TV and folks, we do not look good, especially when we are trying to defend a TV interviewer who thrives on publicity and who sees nothing wrong in showing a video of a young girl being raped or the body of a dead two-year-old who died while being abused, because "dey ketch dem!" So the end justifies the means? This is the equivalent of holding literature readings for children at a fast food outlet. Feed the minds and fatten their little bodies. We may just end up with wonderfully talented obese writers who die young of heart attacks or strokes. Good Touch Bad Touch is an incredibly complex American programme, started in the mid 1980s, that helps children from preschool through primary school to recognise and report the signs of sexual abuse and bullying. It may have important implications for us.
Teaching Good Touch Bad Touch is difficult and is not for the uninitiated. Showing pictures of an adult hugging a child as a bad touch can give the wrong message regarding situations where a hug is appropriate, such as when a parent hugs a child. The main concept to get across is that deciding whether a touch is good or bad, depends on who is doing the touching and how that person is touching another. Anyone who is touching another person on private areas such as breasts, penis, or pelvic area, or who tries to kiss another person without that person's consent is performing a bad touch. When children get good touches such as hugs and kisses from their parents, that should make them feel happy. When people they do not know hug and kiss them, that should make them feel sad or unhappy. This is how you know what is a bad touch. Good touch and bad touch both give children feelings. The difference is that one is not harmful to the person and the other one is. The next step, teaching children to speak up about bad touches, is another problem. The point is that humans, from tiny babies to old hard-back men, instinctively know the difference between a touch that feels good and one that does not. We all are very sensitive to touch.
To teach such a programme, however, is not simply a matter of saying "it nice." It is a programme and needs to be done in the proper way. I love that word proper. It brings back memories of little girls in organdy dresses and short-heeled white shoes with white socks going to church on a Sunday morning. Proper!
Proper calming of small babies used to mean either letting them cry themselves to sleep regardless of whether they were in pain or not or giving them medication, usually "colic medicine" or sugar water. Both work occasionally but not well and not all the time. There have now been two studies that clearly demonstrate that touching the baby works better, something that astute mothers have always known. Since it's done by Americans, it has a special name, like Good Touch Bad Touch, or that implied oxymoron "quality time." It's called the "5 S's" but it basically means hold your baby close to you when he cries. Anyway these guys have made the "considerable" scientific discovery that if a baby is being given a needle at the two-month visit, as in vaccination time, babies who are held close by their mothers, as in breastfeeding or as in simply holding close, cry less than babies whose mothers either did not hold them or gave them sugar water to drink just before the shot. The 5 S's refer to: swaddling, holding the baby in a stomach position, shushing sounds (in the West Indies we would change that to singing), swinging and sucking. If babies were doing four out of five of these 5 S's they would usually stop crying within 45 seconds of the shot. There were two other remarkable things about the babies and their parents. The authors of the studies thought that the combination of sugar water and the 5 S's would give superior results to the 5 S's alone and were surprised to find that the touching programme alone gave better results. The authors tested their hypothesis on more two-month-olds than four-month-olds. They had planned to repeat the study on the same babies at four months but were unable because most of the parents were using touching to soothe their babies.
