Blame the government - The focus is on protection for the family

Blame the government – The focus is on protection for the family

Jun 13, 2008 Features / Columnists

The incidence of sexual abuse, both in the schools and in the home, is cause for concern. Too many of the young people, particularly the girls, are becoming victims of sexual abuse and this should not be. The law is there to protect every individual, and women and children are now more than ever in desperate need of protection from the state.
It is not that domestic violence is nothing new because there have been such reports for as long as one can remember. Women have been beaten and killed, girls raped and even husbands beaten and killed although there are not too many such reports.
The seriousness of this situation caused Government to put laws in place, set up hospices for the abused people and train people to deal with cases of abuse. As a result of these things, the society is hearing more and more about cases of abuse to the point that some feel that the phenomenon is new.
But there is one thing that seems to be a fly in the ointment and this has to do with the role of the police. Some people say that they go to the police with reports of abuse and no action is taken. Sometimes the situation is ignored until death results. For this year alone no less than four women have died horribly at the hands of their spouses.
One of the killers continues to elude the police despite the best efforts of the ranks but this should not be seen as reflection of police inaction although there is evidence that the police are often slow to act.
The Ministry of Human Services and Social Security has been often called on to prod the police because victims have turned to that Ministry with complaints that the police often do nothing. This could be cause for people wanting to blame the government for this but this cannot be the case since in instances where investigations revealed that the police were indeed slow to act, the ranks were disciplined.
The government ensured that the police were exposed to seminars that helped them deal with cases of abuse. The police however say that most times the victims, after an initial report, would return to the police to indicate that they are no longer interested in prosecution.
But the government says that this should not be reason for inaction and as is the case with other situations, every report must be investigated. By doing so the police could actually save lives and the government takes every life seriously.
Abuse is more than physical confrontations between wives and husbands. It results from the actions of those who recruit young women for the purpose of prostitution, sometimes removing these young people from their neighbourhoods. To combat this there are rigid laws couched in the language that would cover the trafficking in people.
Every case has been reported and despite limited resources, the government has moved to prosecute in every case. Those in the international community, always quick to point a finger at developing countries, said that enough was not being done and they blamed the government.
It turned out that the information on which the foreigners base their reports has been greatly inflated, but they too in their haste to prove that they could blame the government persist with their reports.
There is another aspect that is worrying and this involves adults preying on young people. Teachers, employed to be the custodians and role models for young people, are now engaging in sex with their charges. The government is not going to take kindly to this and it is not.
The Minister of Education had announced that such people will be banned from schools and it matters not how needed they may be in the school system. There are the mandatory prosecutions and the government is seeking to enhance its record keeping. There needs to be records of teachers who continue to abuse their position because the Ministry of Education is now learning that some of the people accused of the heinous acts were transferred to other schools to continue their predatory behaviour.
Counselling is crucial in some of these cases and the government is busy training such counselors with no attention to cost because no expenditure could be considered exorbitant when people are involved.