International ‘Females’ Day – three trauma tales

Mar 12, 2017 News

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By Dennis Nichols
A few weeks ago someone asked me why ‘Countryman’ writes so much about people and places

outside of our country, especially the United States. It’s simple; people and places on Earth are now so interconnected that melting polar ice, rippling across the oceans, swell and submerge islands thousands of miles away. They say when America sneezes; Guyana and a hundred other developing nations catch cold. Consequently, on this speck of a planet we call home, some things should be everyone’s business.
Simple, good things happen to people every day and everywhere, and Guyana is no exception. But welcoming a visitor to the country, praising a child for a chore well done, taking a meal for a homeless vagrant, helping a feeble senior citizen to cross a street, and defending a child against a bully don’t usually make the news. A savage murder/suicide does. Human nature takes kindness for granted, but is gossip-titillated by evil.
International Women’s Day just came and went, with its women’s rights themes that embrace females of all ages, although there is usually more focus placed on younger adult women in their professional and domestic lives.
This week I’ve chosen to highlight the most vulnerable females in any society – young children and the very elderly. That is how I came to three horror stories picked out of several thousand that occur daily. Some may see them as cautionary tales, but the truth is that this aspect serves more for reaction than prevention.
Here they are – a child abuse/murder and two cases of rape. Such criminal acts happen every day, so what’s so different about these? Not much really, and that’s one of the scariest things – getting used to them despite of the horror and revulsion they elicit. The main reason for this article is to give food for thought with respect to the part we (the supposedly good) may play, often unwittingly, in provoking malice, and our apathy in preventing it.This is especially true in instances where vulnerability is tied to age, as you’ll see.
First, the two rape cases spanning an age spectrum of a hundred years; yes, you read right;

that’s the age difference between the two victims. In 2014, a 20 year-old youth was charged with sexually assaulting a 101-year-old woman after a failed burglary attempt. A DNA link was established followed by a confession.
At one court appearance he mugged for the cameras and declared “Y’all gonna make me a celebrity.” No one was amused and he was subsequently sentenced to 30 years in prison after charges of burglary, aggravated battery, and second-degree sexual assault charges were established. He’d earlier expressed disbelief at the $100,000 bail set by a judge, and refused to sign a bond agreement, underlying the point I alluded to about seeing such acts as no big deal.
The next case boggles the mind on two levels. The victim in this case was an 8-day-old baby; again you read right; days! And the perpetrator was allegedly the infant’s teenage father. Sometime in 2008, according to reports, he visited his teenaged child-mother and while she showered, raped the baby, somehow managing to fracture her skull in the process. Some of the details may make some readers upchuck their last meal, so I won’t mention them; the internet has no such reservations, so you can go there if you wish. Charges against the teen were dropped over ‘lack of a speedy trial’, (He’d been in custody for five years) delays in mental evaluation which suggested an IQ of 59, and the desire of two key witnesses, the child’s mother and grandmother to ‘drop the whole thing’. The baby didn’t speak up!!
Finally, the worst (to me) because of the obliteration of potential, is the story of eight year-old Gizzell Ford, whose grandmother was last week sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole for the ‘exceptionally brutal’ murder of her granddaughter in 2013. One of the reasons I believe this is such a disturbing tragedy is a gut feeling that Helen Ford must have at some time loved the child, but stress and mental degeneration may have ultimately determined the fate of its three main characters. Here’s a synopsis.
Gizzell was a smart, vivacious, feisty 8-year-old. The straight-A pupil and spelling bee winner lived with her bed-ridden father and burly paternal grand-mother. Details are again very disturbing and the internet is awash with them, so I won’t repeat some. The child kept a diary with entries like ‘I am going to be a beautiful smart and good young lady’; ‘I know if I be good and do everything I’m told I won’t have to do punishments’; ‘I really want to be able to just sit down, watch TV, talk and play with everybody; I’m going to be great all day’; and later ‘Not true. I failed’; “I hate this life because now I’m in super big trouble ’. She’d once written to her teacher, ‘I love you I also love reading, yeah! Love, Gizzell.
Grandma’s ‘punishments’, egged on by Dad, included squatting or being forced to stand still for hours, beaten with a belt with a sock stuffed into her mouth, forced to eat hot peppers, tied to a bed for days while being denied food and water, and punished when she tried to sneak a drink from the toilet.
During the summer holidays she dreamed about the reopening of school, but never made it to that sanctuary. Two days after her last diary entry, welfare officials found Gizzell’s emaciated, strangled body, battered ‘from head to toe’ and clad only in torn underwear, on the floor in her father’s room. Much of her hair had been pulled out and a gaping neck wound was infested with maggots. Her father was lying in bed in pajamas with a laptop. (He later died in jail while awaiting trial)
The welfare of vulnerable human beings like young children and the very elderly should be everyone’s concern, and these cases beg the question. Why was a centenarian obviously living alone, and how could someone young enough to be her great-great-great-grandson, joke about raping her? Didn’t the young father and his 15 year-old girlfriend have anyone to advise them on the ramifications of teenage pregnancy and parenting? Was there any awareness of the subsequent irreparable damage done to an infant although unable to consciously recall the trauma? Was there a socio-economic element that forced the dropping of charges and if so, was that actually the end of the whole thing?
With regards to the Gizzell Ford story, it was suggested that the child was failed by that monstrous thing called ‘the system’, in this case the welfare system, comprising people like you and me. That such an intelligent, focused child could meet such a horrific end is a huge indictment on both the impersonality of bureaucracy and the frailty and ferocity of human nature. The child had a mother, father, siblings, and relatives, all of whom appeared powerless to stem the vitriol and vehemence of an angry, overwrought bully of a woman. A doctor who had noticed a suspected injury on Gizzell, failed to follow it up.
Here in Guyana the situation is not that much different, but we are (still) a poor, infrastructurally-challenged nation; America, where these atrocities occurred isn’t. But all the wealth, amenities and social facilities in the world are impotent in the face of human inhumanity. And despite all the strides women have made in their struggle for respecting their rights, cases like those above reveal that it is far from over, and for the most age-vulnerable, a potential nightmare.
Maybe, as my caption suggests, if ‘Women’ is replaced by ‘Females’, the vulnerable very young and very elderly may stand a better chance of living, and dying, with dignity.

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