Guyana is one of a number of countries in the western hemisphere where child-begging is a manifestation of poverty and while the practice may not be as pronounced here as in the capitals and bigger, more crowded cities of countries like Mexico and Brazil, any country in which poverty in the family renders it necessary to press children into service as beggars has good reason to be concerned with its social fabric. One might add that while in GDP terms both Mexico and Brazil are wealthier countries than Guyana, it has to be said that our local poverty situation is far more manageable and that, accordingly, we have a good deal less reason for the proliferation of child begging.
In those countries where child-begging is far more prevalent than here in Guyana, the pursuit is accepted as a full-time ‘occupation.’ We too have our full-time child beggars, albeit in smaller numbers, and we appear to have long accepted them as a way of life. Then there are the part-time ones; those who stop you on the streets before the start of the school day or during the midday break soliciting money for a meal.
It is one of the signal failures of our parenting culture and our child welfare regime that we have been unable to spare many of our children some of the worst excesses of deprivation not least of which is resort to begging on the streets or any place else for that matter. If much of it may be out of dire necessity too much of it may be a function of flawed parental decision-making… like in those circumstances where ‘shelling out’ in pursuit of ‘a good weekend’ is higher on some parents’ lists of priorities than providing for sustaining breakfasts and nutritious school lunches. It is at that juncture that we become aware that we have entered a crisis of parenting. When a child on their way to school engages an adult in the hope of securing breakfast or a midday meal (and the practice persists here in the capital with monotonous regularity) that, very often, is an indication that the child is – to a greater or lesser extent – responsible for their own material upkeep, Begging on the streets aside (and here the numbers are unclear) some pre-teen children must pursue after school and weekend work to subsidise the family income.
It is an altogether unacceptable existence for those children who must endure it and there is no evidence that anywhere near sufficient official attention is being paid to this particular form of child deprivation and its consequences.
Recently, this newspaper benefited from an absorbing insight into some of the issues that arise in teacher/student relationships on account of what, frequently, is the far too early and forced arrival of some children at a condition of ‘adulthood.’ During an exchange with a senior secondary school teacher she asserted that the ”premature growing up” of children was, in large measure, responsible for many of the challenges, particularly the discipline-related ones that exist in the school system. Her basic point was that when children are forced to lead double lives as schoolchildren and adults, simultaneously, and, for the most part, fend for themselves, they see themselves as fully entitled to behave like adults and to indulge in what, often, are deviant forms of adult behaviour. In other words their delinquent behaviour in school is simply their way of demanding to be recognized as ‘big men and women; because outside of the school environment that is exactly what they are.
Another education official provided an eye-opening perspective on “sibling households,” homes, that are managed by schoolchildren who must ‘double up’ as regular schoolchildren and heads of homes, the latter responsibility including having responsibility for the well-being of other school-age siblings. In some such cases the sibling heads of households must, among other things, manage finances sent by a parent working away from home, invariably in the goldfields or out of the country.
On the subject of child-begging our schoolteacher source suggested that the practice was largely responsible for schoolchildren, primarily girls, having sexual encounters at an early age and serving as an incubator for child prostitution and child abuse.
Particularly in circumstances where poverty persists and where –perhaps more importantly – both child begging and child labour are endorsed and actively encouraged by some parents as accepted means of subsidizing family incomes, this is not an easy problem to tackle; and since it is clearly the case that many children often are inclined to extend the prerogatives of their premature adulthood into the commission of serious crimes, the remedial challenge is a multi-agency responsibility which begins with the home but extends to the social services and child protection and law enforcement agencies.
None of these entities are anywhere near the top of their game. As far as parenting is concerned – and while much of the critical spotlight is usually focused on the various service entities – there is an abundance of evidence that, in various ways, parents are simply not pulling their weight as far as properly attending to the well-being of their children is concerned.
To make matters worse, as a society, we have, on the whole, failed to make child welfare the kind of prominent social issue that it ought to be; so that the entities that are critically concerned with the welfare of children don’t have sufficient human and material resources and the issue itself occupies far too little public space as a matter warranting meaningful and sustained public attention.
We need far more evidence of the allocation of resources for the targeted training of teachers, social workers, counsellors and social welfare officers to, variously, monitor and initiate timely intervention to bring a measure of relief to children who must endure the burden of adult responsibilities.
It should be noted, for example, that for all the plain and incontrovertible evidence that violence and other forms of deviant behaviour have become a serious problem in our school system, no one seems to be aware of any serious scientific study that addresses the likely causes and possible remedies (without which it would be difficult to engage in a structured search for solutions). Indeed what we may find is that some of the delinquent excesses of schoolchildren are, in fact, expressions of the grown-up selves to which they have become accustomed in the less controlled environment outside of school.
As in various other facets of national life we continue to thrive on debating this issue, intensely, over brief periods then allowing it to fade away until we are forced to regurgitate it in the face of another emergency. Each time it re-surfaces, its manifestations appear more hideous and it seems in its magnitude to be more unmanageable.
