Dear Editor,
There is a war on in Guyana and it is against our children. Some adults including some in high positions are on the attack, sexually assaulting our children. Today I open the SN and I read the headline ‘Gentleman jailed over phone theft.’ Isn’t this unnecessary? Couldn’t this chap be made to do community service, cleaning up the cemetery, rather than be sent to jail?
Would it not be more pleasing to the society’s moral revival if that headline had read ‘Corentyne man jailed for life for sexually assaulting child,’ or ‘Mahaica man jailed for sexually assaulting step-daughter’? These are make-believe headlines, but they represent two real cases that remain unsolved. They join the thousands of other unsolved sexual assault cases against mainly children, and most of them do not even get past the notation in the police logbook. This is life for many of our children in today’s Guyana. Guyana has never seen such moral bankruptcy as it is experiencing today.
Every week when one opens the newspapers, one can read stories of children being abused in Guyana and there is no comprehensive response from the authorities. Why? Why? What is going on? It is not that we are naïve or unaware of this situation, because we are constantly reading about children being abused in the media. So, why the silence? Let me ask this question: If your child was sexually abused by an adult, would you not be outraged? Would you not do everything in your power to ensure that the abuser was prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law? Or would you be ashamed to publicly acknowledge what happened to your child because of the purported stigma that will be attached to your family? Or would you prefer to take a cash settlement from the abuser and keep quiet about your child’s sexual abuse? People should think about it because this virus has infected our society and no child has immunity against it.
But there is a deeper undercurrent in Guyanese society. Most of the abusers are close relatives of their victims. However, families in true clannish form sacrifice the child and destroy their family’s future rather than face up to the vagabonds, even if it means public embarrassment to the family. In some cases they sell their children and take a pay-off to ‘stan easy.’ This is not only financial corruption but moral and mental bankruptcy of the highest order. But the argument is being put to me that the helpless families are so poor that they have no other choice than to accept the money to live. I ask, before their child was abused, were they not living? Why do they need this money to live? What prevents them from selling their child again and again until that child blossoms into someone who tells themselves that they have one, and only one asset?
There is no shame in poverty and the only solution to it is hard work and education, not selling your body. But my training makes me a firm believer that good will overcome evil; it must happen, it will happen. Whenever I am faced with these moral issues, I read the verse in the Bhagwat Gita which says, “When immorality is prominent in a family, the women of the family become polluted and from the degradation of womenhood comes unwanted children. Increase of the unwanted population leads to a destruction of the family traditions.” This is what is happening in Guyana, some of the leaders are immoral and the people learn fast from their leaders, but there is hope – the faith-based organisations.
What are the faith-based organisations doing to save our children? Why are they not calling out the Department of Probation & Social Services? I am told that in that Department has some of the most committed social workers in Guyana but their hands are tied as a result of lack of state funds and political support at the highest levels. So why are the faith-based organisations not calling out the political rulers for the underperformance which is leading to destruction of the Guyanese family? I was so pained to read that two children, one 11 year old and one 13 year old from West Coast Berbice are pregnant.
The government has a duty to use whatever technology is available to charge offenders in this type of crime. Procuring the required evidence is not rocket science, since this is what section 76 of the Criminal Law (Offences) Act demands. Philippe de Mazancourt, a forensic biologist at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Garches, France used a DNA test that can prove a person has been raped even if no sperm specimen is found on their body. The researchers found fragments of Y chromosome in nearly 30 per cent of the cases for which standard sperm tests were negative.
Why is the Government of Guyana not saving these children? Ironically, Guyana is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and “By agreeing to undertake the obligations of the convention (by ratifying or acceding to it), national governments have committed themselves to protecting and ensuring children’s rights and they have agreed to hold themselves accountable for this commitment before the international community. Parties to the convention are obliged to develop and undertake all actions and policies in the light of the best interests of the child.” So let us hold the Government of Guyana accountable.
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh
