A scourge has descended on the land

Jan 29, 2011 Editorial

Child sex molestation is more widespread than thought. Perhaps this sickness is endemic but if one were to look at cases in the courts one would be tempted to believe that there is nothing out of the ordinary in the society.
For this week alone there have been four shocking cases, three of which had come to light and have involved the attention of the police. The fourth remains dormant for reasons still to be understood. In one case, a teacher, who is also parading as a religious person, is recorded having sex with one of his students. The evidence suggests that he videoed his sexual exploits, even to the point of recording a conversation he had with a mother of another child at his school at the end of a sexual encounter.
Then there is another teacher who makes an aggressive sexual advance to a very young student of his class. He does not sodomise the boy but he attempts to have the boy sodomise him. The end result is that the child has vicious bite marks about his body. The teacher later claims that these were love bites.
The third case involves the father who sodomises his nine-year-old son and engages in sex with his 11-year-old daughter. This happened at Parika where the children live with this monster. Their mother is dead and during one episode with one of the children this incestuous predator proclaims that if they say anything he is going to kill them in the same way he killed their mother.
The fourth case involves the owner of a prominent city business establishment whose three-year-old daughter tells the teacher that her father sexually molests her.
A few weeks earlier there was the alcoholic family who put their 13-year-old daughter to prostitute herself so that they could get money for even more alcohol. And before that there were numerous other cases. There was the Rupununi father who impregnated his daughter, the man who fathered his daughter with his daughter and then turned to father his other child with his granddaughter.
This situation of child sex has reached epidemic proportions. Perhaps it was happening all the time but is only now coming to light because of the expanded communication network through the introduction of the smart phones and the internet.
The fact that no child appears to be safe does not speak well for the society. Last year, the Human Services Ministry processes 3,067 cases of child molestation. That same Ministry has moved to protect almost 400 children by placing them in protective custody. But there are so many others out there who cannot be helped because there are just not enough people to process their plight.
Guyana recognized this aberration to social life and moved to introduce laws to put an end to this despicable situation. There was for example, the Domestic Violence legislation which came after the nation recognized that wife beating had become endemic. But even with this legislation women are still being beaten because the penalty is not as severe as the law suggests. Perhaps the law has not gone far enough.
Indeed the magistrates would, from time to time, jail the male abuser. No female abuser has ever been jailed for domestic abuse. It is the same with the Sexual Offenders Act. There are the odd cases of prosecutions of the male. More often than not, the case is not properly prepared. There is not enough use of the so-called paper committals.
The paper committals necessitate the provision of all statements to the defence and after certain other legal procedures the matter goes straight to the High Court. There has been no implementation of paper committals despite the fact that the Sexual Offences Act has been in existence for nearly two years.
In any case, paper committals are not automatic because there is still scope for the court to proceed to the High Court by way of a preliminary inquiry.
The police still rely on statements from the accused and in the courts; the matters are proceeded with in a manner no different from what operated in the past. But more than this, one must examine the situation rather closely. Decency is learnt in the home and the fact that the predators now roam the streets suggests that not much was learnt where trained human behaviour begins.

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