A failure to act and the consequences

Oct 05, 2010 Editorial

Over the weekend a resident in the vicinity of Emerald Towers made a most gruesome discovery. He found the headless body of a woman who turned out to be none other than a sixteen-year-old student of Queen’s College. The body had been stuffed into a suitcase and weighted, perhaps to keep it from floating.
Such deaths are not unusual. Not so long ago the police found the body of a high school boy, again in a suitcase. His was a case of a kidnapping. The police are still trying to ascertain a motive although there are reports that greed may be behind the killing. They have already arrested the girl’s mother and stepfather.
A most horrible story is emerging. There are reports that the girl confided in her schoolmates about strange happenings—about being given what was supposed to be a vitamin pill but which turned out to be some drug that left her disoriented. She spoke of sexual abuse, and she being a grade A student at the leading secondary school in the country.
In Guyana, child sex abuse in nothing new although every case evokes in the decent minded the same feeling of revulsion and anger. It is this anger that sometimes leads to people taking the law into their own hands.
We cannot pronounce on this issue but we are certain that the now dead child was pushed to the brink of insanity. She must have been doing strange things because on September 25, last, the girl’s mother went to the police station to file a missing person’s report. It turned out that the mother claimed that her daughter had gone missing two days earlier.
And so it is that we come to the support system that exists in the country. All too often, people talk about seeking help from the authorities and failing to receive any. The list of the complaints is long. People have pointed to slain women—women who died at the hands of their spouses—who during their lifetime, often sought the help of the police but got nothing.
They said that the police would inform them that the issue was domestic in nature and therefore outside their scope of operation. This continued until the authorities now say that the police must be proactive in cases of domestic violence.
We have also heard about people going to organisations set up to help disadvantaged people trying to help by offering advice and not much else. The result is that the affected people cannot use the advice, often suffering serious consequences.
There was the case of the woman who was stabbed outside Stabroek Market. She had been making constant reports to the police. In one case her relatives reported that the police told her that she was making too many reports. “You coming too stead,” the police reportedly told her. She is now dead. And so we come to the case of the young girl. Relatives of the victim say that this girl was a troubled youth and that her plight did not go unnoticed. She was beaten and actually went to school with the marks of violence. Her teachers never said anything to her because they cared less. The girl confided in her friends who told teachers who did nothing. Further, the teachers must have noticed the girl’s falling grades. In the official system a teacher would express concern and would summon the parents. It is surprising that a school like Queen’s College did not do this on this occasion.
One cannot explain this lackadaisical attitude on the part of the authorities although fatal consequences result from inaction. There must be an investigation and a thorough one at that. The Ministry of Education must enquire about the last days of this girl; it must review her performance and then ask teachers whether they failed to notice the decline. This was a student who last attended school in June, ahead of the examinations. She failed to return to school for the new school year. Surely this must have warranted an investigation but sadly, there was none and the child is dead.

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A failure to act and the consequences

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