Dear Editor,
The media has reported that Minister of Education Dr Nicolette Henry went to Richard Ishmael Secondary School to respond to a boy’s attack on a girl. It is reported that she met with the boy and the girl he attacked and they “were made to apologize to each other”.
The first response to the outrageous attack from the Ministry indicated a dismissal of the seriousness of the violence in our schools.
The Ministry is yet to indicate what interventions are being made to support Richard Boodram, the young student from Mon Repos Primary School, who was beaten by other students and is in hospital. There were previous reports of bullying at the school. There are no reports of any sustained interventions at Mon Repos or any other school to respond to the intense violence which children are witnessing and experiencing.
It seems the Ministry of Education thinks this is all ‘normal’.
The Minister of Education, it seems, made the girl do something to the boy who attacked her. She required this girl to take responsibility for the violence meted out against her, like so many other girls and women have experienced violence from men and boys. So, the Minister made the girl apologise to the boy who attacked her. There was no mention of any interventions with the students who were bystanders and who did nothing more than video and share the video of the attack. Those bystanders were acting as “their brother’s keepers” while no one seemed to be their sister’s keeper.
We call on the Minister to apologise to the girl now, to let her know that she did not deserve any violence. We call on the Ministry of Education and its officials to explore their ignorance of the dynamics of gender-based violence, to realise how that ignorance perpetuates gender-based violence in Guyana and to take action to be relevantly informed.
Yours faithfully,
Karen DeSouza, Janice Jackson, Josephine
Whitehead, Sherlina Nageer, Vidyaratha Kissoon
