Revisiting dangerous grounds

May 25, 2021 Editorial

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Kaieteur News – No matter how often we talk about it, write about it, or broadcast it, we cannot say enough about what is going on, so we have no choice but to continue, until there is some sense that we are making progress.  We at this publication must visit again today the horror and the blight of domestic violence.  Now it seems that the passions that are ignited will not be satisfied, not be doused, until somebody, some hapless and vulnerable partner, is stabbed to death, shot to death, or otherwise brutalised in some heinous manner to a ghastly death.

It is more than embarrassing to editorialise about this once more.  But how can we do otherwise, since such would be the height of irresponsibility, of callous indifference?  For the victims, who are mostly women, are somebody’s mother, or granddaughter, or daughter, or sister, or niece, or cousin or well-regarded and well-loved family member or neighbour.  That is, by everyone, including (most ironically) those in whose aggravated minds, and at whose bloody hands, they are dispatched in the most gruesome ways from this world to that of another.

We do not know, but perhaps, at long last, there is some ease, some peace, some blanket of comfort in some form, for those who have lived, indeed, with a long relationship and a longer life of unimagined terror.  Terror in their own little homes, terror before their own little ones forced to observe in cowering silence and fear, terror in the little pittance of a life that they were trying to put together, despite circumstances, in spite of the odds.

This is the 21^st century, and to some extent, Guyana can be thought of as a society developing towards some sense of modernity, and right alongside the evidence of trickling cosmopolitan standings and ambitions.  But yet we seem to remain helplessly bogged down and hopelessly trapped in what is a full-blown national scourge, a humiliating one, which is medieval in its essences.  It is humiliating because these incidents of deadly domestic violence, when such senselessly flare to the point of no return, reveals to the whole world the barbaric and backward nature of too many sections of this community here and that community over there, until the sum of them is the national embarrassment that we have to live with, and for which we seem to be all but powerless.

Whether it is from ingrained jealousies, or the ravages of drugs and alcoholism, or the desperations and stresses of economic tightness, there are these stabbings and slashing and shootings and killings that just would not give either partners or country any feeling of relief.  They just would not go away, to that much longed for point where, when an incident of lethal domestic violence does occur, it is more of a rarity than an almost everyday reality.

We will agree that things on the murderous domestic violence front appear to be not as rampaging as before.  The numbers are lower, the reports are lesser, and the sense is that there have been some tiny steps of progress.  That is, until there are these harrowing blasts that batter eyesight in reading, and mind from absorbing, yet again.  It does not matter on which day that the news come, there is the feeling of déjà vu, and here we go again.  It is that any thinking that things have gotten better is a mirage, and that we fool ourselves.  This was what registered in Linden in the instance of a young woman who disappeared (and encircling not just partner and suspect, but a parent and a sister); and also came right back in the face of the terrible killing of a woman living in Durban Street.  It is an indication of the jealous rage that went into that premeditated murder that she was stabbed some 14 times, and with her horrified child compelled to witness the deed, who now live with those traumatic scars for the rest of his life.

This is what goes on all too frequently, and serves to remind us that there is this virus and venom in the veins of perpetrators, who live with their passions and frustrations and overloaded and short-circuited emotions.  This is a most difficult one to contain, since there is so much of the cultural that is at work so much that is missing in what we have in hand, and what we have to offer the few who brave the odds and actually dare to seek protection.  The protections of a piece of paper, or the reluctant and occasional presence of the police (and more and more neighbours, too), all fall short, way short.  And these are sometimes not helped by the dead victims own hoping against hope, willingness to live the life of change and second chances.  For some, it is the last error in judgment, which too often proves to be a fatal one.  It is what our women live with, what this country has to pretend is not as bad as it once was.  But it is there, and waiting for the blowup and the fall down.

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