An absence of social services

Jun 23, 2011 Editorial

There is a strange wind blowing across the country. We see unnecessary road accidents, drownings, fires across the country and missing children, particularly girls. Parents seem to have lost the art of parenting and many end up getting hurt, emotionally, when their children end up in anti-social conditions.
It is time the society takes a hand to curb these things. The fires are astonishing by virtue of the rate of which they are occurring. Many homes are still of wood. People say that they would have turned off all their electrical and household appliances only to go home to find the house in flames. In one case the householders were actually sitting on the stairs outside their home when someone alerted them to the conflagration.
Just yesterday, a woman claimed that she was in bed having listened to a religious broadcast when the lights went. Not long after there was a fire. Such tales are all too numerous. Then there are the fires in the new residential areas where the access roads are little more than tracks. They hinder the approach of firefighting equipment.
The Guyana Fire Service is often blamed for slow response. No one looks at the approaches. But the factor most overlooked is the absence of a source of water. Fire hydrants are all but non-existent and there is no move to make them a part of the landscape. These are increasingly needed because there are more houses being constructed and there are more people who are careless.
Then there is the recklessness on the roads. Indeed a lot of money is being spent improving the roadways and for even making more of them. For some time now we have been advocating harsher penalties for careless road use.
A speeding motorist kills a child and seriously injures her brother. He was said to be travelling twice above the speed limit. He not only kills the child, he flees the scene of the accident. The laws allow for a custodial sentence but this will not be the case. The court will insist that it was an accident.
There are others who do worse. Many of them will escape the full force of the law because they would be allowed to approach certain police ranks who could make a mess of the investigation and thus a mess of the case. Some will simply not be caught. The state cannot escape blame. There are too many corrupt people in serious positions.
Then there are those very young people who ‘disappear’ from their homes. Increasingly young girls leave home, more often than not to ‘shack up’ with a grown person. And these girls come from every quarter of the country. Nearly all of them are schoolgirls. The state talks about serious penalties for statutory rape. The perpetrators are often ignored. The police often times do not pursue the matter.
The schools welfare departments tend to concentrate on truants leaving behind children with problems. Many parents would complain about the actions of their young children because they have grown to believe that they cannot discipline their children in the best manner they know. These days, children simply go to the police who then approach the Ministry responsible for children who in turn would invoke police action.
Many parents would say that they would seek the help of the school and while there are teachers who would listen, these teachers rarely go out of their way to help. They would say that they have their own problems. This makes things even worse because the child is aware of the parent’s plea for help and of the result. Nothing changes.
That is why we want to see a concentration of effort in these social areas. Indeed, there is a lot of money being spent on the physical infrastructure with a view to making people feel comfortable. But life is also about the social conditions. People expect to have the forces in place to be there for them when the need arises.
The social services should be staffed to cope with the myriad problems. The government must spend more money in this area. People must be trained and properly paid. Once they work the society could see a drastic change in behaviour.
This is the case in other societies because the authorities recognize that for all the physical infrastructure, unless there is the supporting social system then there is bound to be collapse.

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Latest News