Latest update May 7th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 18, 2017 Letters
Dear Editor,
The Caribbean Voice supports CPIC Monique’s call for civil society to get involved in the campaign against child abuse. Mechanisms must be put n place to foster the involvement of civil society.
One such mechanism is our Youth & Student Workshop, which has been endorsed by the Ministry of Education and already been taken to a number of private schools, but for which we are awaiting permission to take to public schools across Guyana. This workshop focuses on arming young people with alertness and awareness with respect to abuse and violence (domestic, gender based, sexual, physical, substance related, online and Internet) and equip them with knowledge, self-esteem, self-confidence and coping skills to face challenges and stress.
Within this context too we expect to soon launch a National Youth and Students Essay Contest, also endorsed by the Ministry of Education that would become annual. This year’s focus in on suicide, with the aim of getting young people to engage in primary research and information eliciting within their communities and in developing models for redress thereby becoming change agents on the social landscape.
Meanwhile, the media – traditional and social –recently publicized a case of corporal punishment that left a student bleeding and in pain. There have been many similar cases over the years and this begs the following questions: Are doctors required to report such cases of child abuse to the authorities for investigation, or is it simply a question of parents seeking redress without assistance? Why is the cane still used in Guyana, when the country that exports it has banned its use in the classroom?
Did this teacher teach his students homework/study skills, or he just expects his students to know how to do homework and study? Did this teacher have or considered having a conference with the parents? Did this teacher have or considered having a discussion with other teachers of this child so as to find out whether any perceived behaviour is across the board or only unique to his/her instructional time/subject?
Can the administration in a private school immediately relieve a pedagogue of his/her duties or agree to a psychiatric evaluation/mental status evaluation when these kinds of mental aberrations occur? The bottom line is that there should be a clearly defined process of disciplinary action by the Ministry of Education to address corporal punishment that must also include possible psychological help for any teacher who displays the tendencies inherent in the actions of this particular teacher.
TCV needs to point out that a training workshop on ‘Classroom Management without Corporal Punishment’ was offered free of charge to the Ministry of Education in the previous government and also to the current government. The previous government pulled the plug at the last moment after TCV and the VSO (which has since pulled out of Guyana) had put measures in place for the workshop. The current government has not acknowledged our offer to date.
As well, it is in this context of the need to protect children and the vulnerable that we launched our petition for a registry of sex offenders in 2015, and thus support the recent announcement by Ann Green, head of the Child Care and Protection Agency for the establishment of such a registry in 2018. Consequently we must respond to criticism of such a registry by a recent letter writer in the local media.
To begin with, there is the straw man argument that the registry is not a solution to sexual abuse, a claim never made. The fact is that there is no single mechanism that can eliminate sexual (or any other) abuse but the registry can be one item in a basket of measures that would include other items such as education (National Youth and Students Essay Contest), sensitization and training (Youth & Student Workshop), active oversight and monitoring, increased parental empowerment and harnessing (such as through Parent Teachers’ Associations and religious institutions), providing teeth to all impacting laws and unrelenting applying them, police training, so they can handle cases with sensitivity and empathy as well as display an understanding of the factors that militate and so on.
Also the citing of selective data and stats to argue that a registry is ineffective is a disingenuous ‘seeing a tree and shouting that the forest has been found’ technique that ignores registries globally. The fact is that the registry enables citizens to know who of their neighbours is a registered offender. This knowledge not only helps to develop a greater level of awareness and alertness leading to proactive preventive steps as well as a reservoir of community activists and advocates but also ensures that perpetrators are reminded that they should not again indulge in such actions and if necessary, seek help to prevent themselves from doing so.
It must be noted too that the vast majority of the sexual assaults are perpetrated by family, friends and acquaintances, and thus it is better to be as proactive about sex offenses as possible and take advantage of the tools available in the community so that no one is enabled to perpetrate such acts.
Annan Boodram
The Caribbean Voice
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