IT is unbelievable that just after a few days when two very young children were hacked to death and their mother is miraculously surviving after a severe chopping also and as as a result will be maimed for life, an elderly man would be chopped to death and yet another woman and two teenagers would be brutally chopped.

These horrendous incidents are most chilling and shocking, but undoubtedly they are a reflection of the madness that seems to be unfortunately enveloping our society. This is indeed frightening and tells us something is radically wrong with the psyche of our people.
It is unimaginable that a father could become so angered to look his very young children in their eyes and send them so cruelly to their death, while a similar attempt on the life of their mother was also made by the same man.
But from all reports, this was not a spontaneous incident. In fact, it is the climax of many years of enduring domestic abuse and violence and begs the question of why the mother did not remove herself and children from this situation. The answer to this question would never be a simple and straightforward one, because matters of human relationships are always complicated.
An aunt of the deceased children told this newspaper that every time she travelled from Essequibo to see the family, the now dead five-year old would ask that she take them away from the home since she was afraid that one day their father would kill them all in the house.
The woman said that her niece related to her that every time her father gets upset with their mother he would usually pull the cutlass on them and was in the habit of threatening to kill them.
However, the bigger question which arises is what did the community in which the mother and her two young deceased children lived, do to help, because inevitably members of that community would have been aware of the situation.
Of course, in our so-called modern society, it may be argued that people no longer pry into other people’s business and respect their privacy. Or could it be that they offered help and it was rejected. We may never know the answer to this question, but certainly the issue of a threat to the lives and limbs of two young children and their mother cannot be a private matter and one of being meddlesome.
It seems as though in this modern age, the community spirit is dwindling to nought and is something of the past which is most unfortunate and this has clearly had detrimental effects on the proper functioning of our society. It may be argued, with a large degree of merit, that this diminishing community spirit has contributed to deteriorating levels and decline of morality, indiscipline and increased criminal activities.
However, regardless of whether the community spirit is diminishing or not, there is an urgent need for the issue of violence and domestic abuse to be addressed, because if one were to judge from what has happened in the last few days, then we have a serious problem on our hands.
We have seen so many instances across the world where societies were almost decimated because of violence; and so we cannot and must not allow this problem to do the same to our country which is on the road to socio-economic progress and advancement. In fact, it has made tremendous strides in this regard; and if we do not address the issue of violence with the urgency it merits, we could run the risk of reversing all the progress we have made as a nation.
Growing violence and domestic abuse are affecting almost every country in the world, be it developing or developed and a solution has to be found because this severe problem could undermine the foundations of society, thus threatening its future existence.
Every nine seconds in the US a woman is assaulted or beaten, while around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime. Most often, the abuser is a member of her own family.
Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women—more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined;and studies suggest that up to 10 million children witness some form of domestic violence annually.
Yet this age is described as the one of greatest civilisation of mankind. What an irony!