A tiny, tentative step in the right direction

Jul 15, 2008 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
When one encounters a foreign language for the first time, one has two choices: to make an effort to try to understand it or to dismiss it as mere gibberish.

I somewhat fear the latter may have happened to Mr. Roger Williams, through no fault of his own, in his letter, “Children are the inevitable losers where corporal punishment (CP) is excluded in a range of disciplinary measures,” (July 14, 2008), when he calls my last letter ‘an avalanche of intellectual-sounding gibberish.’

It is beyond my expertise to help Mr. Williams learn the language, as I can only speak the language I know, as I will now do.

The study, “Voices of Children: Experiences with Violence,” reported the interconnection between social violence and “child to child violence in the Jamaican schools.

A study found that 70% students had seen fights with a weapon (usually a knife), 30% students had been hurt in fights and needed treatment… In Jamaica, 13 to 19-year-old adolescents make up almost a quarter of the perpetrators of major crimes (armed robbery, assault, rape and murder).”

The report describes the situation in Guyana thus: “Emotional and physical violence perpetrated by children against peers was not uncommon in schools: 37% of children had been told hurtful things by a peer; 18% of the children had been threatened with harm by a peer; 32% of the children had been hurt by a peer.

The majority of perpetrators was children the same age and gender as the victim, and sometimes described by the child as ‘friends’.

Unlike physical abuse in the home, boys were more than twice as likely as girls to be subject to this type of violence in the school: 45% of boys reported being hurt in school compared to 21% of girls.

Interestingly, there is no difference between children in the general population and children with disabilities, orphaned children, out-of-school children or children in children’s homes or the NOC.

All were equally likely to experience physical and emotional violence from peers at school.” (Cabral, C. and Speek-Warnery, V. (Eds.) (2004) Voices of Children: Experiences with Violence. Report produced for Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security, Red Thread Women’s Development Programme and UNICEF-Guyana.)

If Guyanese were to report every time a child steals cookies from the jar or mangoes from our trees or sneaks into a cricket ground without paying (a successful businessman confessed to the latter two in a recent Kaieteur News article) or gets involved in a schoolyard scrap or commits any one of the childhood misdemeanors most of us would have committed, no doubt reported incidents of child crimes will go up.
This only means that there is better reporting, not that there is an increase in child crimes.

Any increase in juvenile misdemeanors, as I outlined in my previous letter, could be due to so many other factors not related to the lack of CP, but more closely related in time, location and physical nature to the children.

In other words, these other factors have closer proximity of cause to misbehavior than does the lack of CP. Mr. Williams ignores these other factors and focuses on the lack of CP to his own peril. Additionally, reporting child crimes might cause copy-cat incidents.

The point is that child crimes in Guyana (and in the Caribbean) may be more rampant than in the UK, but Guyanese just don’t bother to report them, either because we have little confidence in the police or we think it unnecessary to do so.

We must note that CP is not banned in UK homes; according to a 2004 House of Lord ruling, parents can still use CP provided no marks are left on their children. And CP is definitely still alive and kicking in Guyana and Jamaica.

Mr. Williams’ reference to http://www.corpun.com/gys00406.htm does not give the full picture of what the children really said, as for some unknown reason, it missed the Stabroek News report of June 17, 2004, “Culture of beating children goes deep – workshop on alternatives told”.

According to that report, “The First Lady said some 3,645 children [64% of the primary sample] in the primary schools were in favour of corporal punishment and 2,043 [36% of the primary sample] were against it, while at the secondary schools, 923 children were in favour [41% of the secondary sample] and 1,335 [59% of the secondary sample] against.

“ Ignoring the vital questions of the methodology of data-collection such as whether the samples were random and therefore fair and representative of the general population of children, we note that the majority of secondary school children (who operate at Piaget’s higher formal operational stage of cognitive thinking) rejected CP, while the majority of primary children (at the lower concrete operational stage) favoured CP.

This clearly shows that the older children can reason and think independently, while the younger ones simply believed what adults must have told them.

A statistical test of significance shows that the difference between the primary children and the secondary children favouring of CP has an astonishingly high statistical significance.
This raises the troubling question: Were the younger ones coerced into favouring CP, or else…?

If the primary and secondary figures are aggregated, then 4,577 children (57.5 %) favoured CP and 3,378 (a significant 42.5%) rejected it.

The impression given by Mr. Williams – “a resounding “No” to the removal of CP” – is that the children overwhelmingly support CP; the true figures indicate a more muted voice.

But then, should the question of to beat or not to beat be answered by a referendum of the persons to be beaten?

The SN report went on to say that similar workshops had been planned for other parts of the country, including Berbice. But for unknown reasons these workshops never materialized.

Finally, Mr. Williams has admitted that “the Judeo-Christian [a term reputable theologians consider obsolete] position advocates clearly the freedom to choose to NOT use CP, but compels Christians and citizens to be cognizant of its rightful and justifiable place in a scheme or range of disciplinary measures.”

I do wish Mr. Williams would emphasize the first point more vocally to some churches as they ardently believe that they have NO choice but that they MUST use CP.

At least we have made a little progress, for the greatest journey must begin with the tiniest, however tentative, step in the right direction, as I myself took about 13 years ago.

Come next year when we begin yet another round of debate on CP, seven more countries may well have abolished CP, in schools or homes, or both. Dare we hope that Guyana will be among them?
M. Xiu Quan-Balgobind-Hackett

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