WE must certainly condemn this kind of treatment of the three young girls ages 12, 14 and 15 who were being held at the Albion Police Station and were placed before the court for wandering and now waiting to be deployed to the New Opportunity Corps at Onderneeming on the Essequibo Coast. These girls went through terrible times at a children’s orphanage home in Corentyne and we should feel the deepest remorse for them.

We need to see how as a society we collude to spawn these circumstances. When little girls like these commit suicide, it is discovered that constant abuse and sexual harassment of their abusers led them to it.
It is amazing to see how many of these cases go un-noticed by the police, the Ministry of Human Service and Child Protection Agency or being neglected at this very children’s home. Just listen to the mother (allegedly) telling their sons to sleep with these minors and to “be a man” after abusing these three innocent young girls or – it is a call to take control both of oneself and the situation rather than to submit to one’s human weakness. In essence, we acculturate males to excise their vulnerabilities, their softer side in favour of a more macho, dominant disposition.
For decades, police prosecutors and magistrates have been behaving like legislators, making laws as they see fit. The magistrate court, for example, recently ruled that these young girls be deployed to the NOC without asking for a probation report from the school welfare officer before passing the sentence on them thereby overturning the law, The honourable magistrate rationalised the ruling by saying that the NOC is the best place applying punishment to such a crime as wandering.
These children should have been placed in care with the Child Protection Agency, rather than being placed in the lock-up at the Albion Police Station where advantage can be taken of them. This ruling alas, is not unusual since the country’s courts have increasingly usurped powers they previously hadn’t had.
For feminists this would be yet another incident of cruelty against these young girls, yet we must see this tragedy as a consequence of certain prevalent psychological and socio-political dysfunctions within our society, sometimes occasioned by the family who manage the orphanage themselves. This is not an attempt to minimise the cruelty of this act or exonerate the child molesters, but it explains one of the root causes of child abuse, children’s deaths and child committing suicide we have sadly experienced over the years in Guyana.
When our little daughters, like these three girls, become victims of this darkness, we are rightly aggrieved. But can the owner of this children’s home at Albion truthfully escape responsibility to these children? I think this orphanage needs to be investigated thoroughly and the owner be brought before the court for neglect of the children.

MOHAMED KHAN