The GHRA is calling for concerted and urgent action from the Ministry of Health and the Guyana Police Force for a more professional and realistic response to allegations of sexual assault in hinterland areas.
“There is clearly also a sense of impunity developing in hinterland areas, whereby perpetrators of sexual offences believe themselves to be beyond the reach of the law”, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) said in a statement yesterday.
It said that widespread indignation, at least among females in the community, is being spurred by the growing number of sexual attacks in the area. These include the recent case of a young woman sexually assaulted and murdered, whose body was found in bushes and nothing has come of it.
“They also complained that within a day’s walk of Matthews Ridge, miners from the coast have virtually taken over some small villages, where they wait till parents get drunk then prey on girls as young as seven years old. The clamour that ”No one here responsible for Amerindians” was a further echo of Mahdia”, the GHRA asserted.
The GHRA cited several other cases. One referred to a hotel worker at Mahdia who said that she was gang-raped, a case reported on extensively by Stabroek News and another at Matthews Ridge reported by Kaieteur News.
In the Matthews Ridge case, GHRA said that neither the police nor the medical staff at Pakera hospital probed allegations of sexual assault made by a 55-year old woman because she could not tell the story as clearly as they would have liked. The woman, GHRA said, suffered a speech impediment following a stroke about eighteen months ago.
“Despite torn underwear, as well as the presence of relatives and friends capable of understanding what the woman says, the police and doctor focused entirely on physical assault. The police also claim she did not complain of rape”, GHRA argued.
It added that members of the family and community are angered by the police and medical responses to the incident.
“In the first place, it was handled entirely by male police and male medical staff when there are female police and medics available in the community. The hospital, the GHRA was informed, did not perform any examination for sexual assault because the victim only complained of a physical assault. It is also alleged that the woman never got to tell her story properly because the policeman in charge of the station was more interested in questioning her “about her life history”, asking her some questions she wasn’t able to answer and loudly talked her down when she tried to talk about the rape. Relatives informed the GHRA that ‘you don’t need a sign language interpreter to understand her, lots of people who know her can tell what she is saying'”.
The GHRA said it was told that following publication of the case, a detective appointed to re-investigate, has instructed the female relative most active in pushing the case not to come back to the police station or the hospital and has assigned a male relative as the main interlocutor for the victim.
“The suspected perpetrator of the rape, as reported in KN, is well-known to the victim, who took the police to his home. The disability dimension of this case should be a cause of serious concern. The inability of a person to speak clearly by reason of disability cannot be an excuse for not taking action on what they allege. More formal arrangements may be required for court proceedings, but the police cannot demand similar standards in order to pursue investigations. In both the Mahdia case and this case, circumstantial evidence pointed clearly to the need to examine and investigate for sexual assault. The unavailability of rape kits is no excuse for not doing so”, the GHRA argued.
