AS the discussions on how to deal with violence rages on, may I suggest the following? Billboards should be mounted in every region, even districts, sponsored by local businesses and utilising local artists, even budding artists in schools.
PSAs in the media featuring leading personalities who can be prevailed upon to donate their time and efforts: sports stars such as Sarwan, Shiv and others; local performing stars; Guyana Ms. World and Ms. Universe; the President, the First Lady, PNC leader Granger, Ramjattan and other politicians and other leading individuals such as Stanley Ming, Eric Phillips, Ravi Dev, Faith Harding, Syedha Manbodh and others; even outstanding young people such as that young lady who topped the CXC/CSEC exam results. The media can donate time slots and/space, and ad- agencies, photographers and related personnel can donate services to produce the PSAs.
Umbrella religious organisations can work with their churches, mosques and mandirs to regularly propagate anti-violence messages and set up intervention and support mechanisms. Priests, pandits and moulvis can be instrumental in this respect.
School curricula should incorporate anti-violence on a regular basis, and utilise many media to bring this out – debates, essays, poetry, art, posters, drama, role-playing, focus groups, class discussions. In addition to teachers, resource personnel can include police, community leaders and members of the legal fraternity and so on. Special parents day on the theme of anti violence can also be organised and this theme can be focused on at special school activities such as, sports days and PTA meetings.
Guyanese websites and other Internet presence can place anti-violence banner ads on their sites/pages. This should include websites of all political parties, businesses, NGOs and so on. Maybe the government can set up a webpage with all sizes of banners that can be used. I’m pretty certain many diaspora sites would also jump on this bandwagon.
Sports clubs, through umbrella sports organisations and the Ministry of Sports, can create anti-violence banners, which can be prominently displayed at all sporting activities and each time there is an activity, the anti-violence message can be spread. In fact, the same can be done by organisations of all sorts – social, business, youth, women, professional and other NGOs.
Government agencies should regularly propagate anti-violence messages to all and sundry within their ambits via emails, flyers, on bulletin boards, announcements at meetings, social occasions and so on. Human resource personnel can be sensitised to spot warning signs and set up interventions, and their doors should be open for adults to enter and discuss issues relating to violence – actual or pending. The private sector and professionals can implement similar strategies.
Political parties, at all gatherings, including public meetings, can make sure that the anti-violence message is put out. In fact, each political party can set up mechanisms that can reach into their grassroot support and help with identifying warning signs and interventions. Ditto for trade unions and other mass based organisations.
Police sensitisation must be continual and ongoing at every level to ensure that laws are complied with and that police apply same, in a timely and incisive manner. There should be no tolerance for violence of any kind. Also, community-policing groups can be provided with some training to play a role in anti-violence prevention, intervention and action.
Postering can be done at high traffic and critical locations throughout the nation. I’m pretty certain that many entities and individuals in the diaspora would be willing to get posters done and available so that frayed and damaged posters can always be replaced. I volunteer to be a coordinator in this respect.
At the village level efforts must be made by any and all agencies – religious institutions, political parties, sports clubs, schools and so on – that have the scope and capacity to build an anti-violence culture and an outlook that makes intervention everybody’s business, whether it is to preempt violence, to prevent it from becoming fatal or to provide support and advise as well as to ensure help and intervention.
All of this calls for a coordinated approach via which responsibility must be shouldered at many levels by entities across all divides. Done on a regular and continual basis this can surely yield the expected results over time with minimal financial outlay. All that is needed is a start. Why not ask the Amazon Warriors to take the lead? The media can quickly and easily jump in followed by sports and political parties and then others can begin to play their parts as coordination evolves.
Meanwhile, there are already local institutions that can become both resource and coordination points – Red Thread and Help and Shelter being the most recognisable. Perhaps the private sector and the diaspora can chip in to help these entities set up offices in outlying areas. While this is evolving, other entities can offer space sharing wherever that is possible – business and professional organisations, political parties, even private citizens. And perhaps the interpersonal unit called for by the APNU, can be brought into being through these two organisations, and supplemented by other professionals as well as by volunteers, initially centrally, but eventually nationwide.
Anti-violence must become everybody’s business and immediately so! For God’s sake, Guyana is small enough, both in terms of demographics and inhabited landscape, for it to be an eminently doable task to collaboratively work to save lives and perhaps transform the society in the process, especially given that most of what needs to be harnessed is already in place. After all, our history tells us that politics, race, religion are never obstacles in the face of people’s willpower and resolve. In fact, there was a time in the not too distant past, when the village actually raised the child and everyone was each other’s keeper. Surely Guyanese can gradually imbibe those traits again.
Meanwhile, President Donald Ramotar should follow the lead of Trinidad & Tobago’s Prime Minister, Kamla Bissesar and hold talks with PNC Leader, David Granger, and AFC’s Khemraj Ramjattan on pragmatic and implementable ways to deal with the violence consuming the nation, including the ones suggested above.