RESIDENT Welfare, Child Protection and Probation Officers are badly needed in the Port Kaituma/Baramita and other areas within the Matarkai Sub-Region of Region One to properly address the issue of child exploitation. Stephanie Miguel, of the Guyana Women Miners Association (GWMA), who operates in the area, related this observation to the Guyana Chronicle in an interview in Central Port Kaituma on Friday morning.
Miguel said the police have been supportive of recent, but that organisation can do only so much; and had the community received the necessary police support in times gone by, the situation in the region would have been much improved.

According to Miguel, she has been working in the Port Kaituma area for the past year, and for her, the biggest concern is trafficking in persons. Before she came into the area, she said, she was informed that the area was without resource persons (welfare, child protection and probation officers), thus she has been voluntarily playing the role of those persons since going to live at Port Kaituma.
While it is not a problem to her, as she cares about the community, the officers are needed there because she is often overwhelmed.
“All the calls come to me, and I try my best. The police support me because I go (to them) and I make complaints, and they help by going into the Backdam, where (once) we find a 12-year-old girl pregnant and there is a lot of advantage taking place there, but no representation for those children,” Miguel explained.
This publication was also told that recently, during a visit to the area, Miguel and her team came across children below the age of 11 sleeping on the road all night.
She said that in such cases they collaborate with all the relevant government agencies and the GWMA office in Georgetown, to ensure that actions are taken in Georgetown that can cause a chain effect in addressing the issue when those are unearthed.
GOLDEN CITY
She said that in an area called “Golden City”, there are lots of children who are away from their parents and living the road life, and there is no immediate mechanism to bring the parents to answer to any authority in the district. She said that it is the intention and wish of the GWMA to see some parents, especially mothers, being charged for knowingly allowing their children to have a street and club presence.
Example was also given of a 7-year-old girl who had a ‘hickey’ on her neck. According to Miguel, the GWMA and its members were hurt to the core, and it pushed them to even more robust advocacy for better attention to be paid to the hinterland regions and the children there, especially girls.
Miguel was frank in speaking of the neglect the community has suffered over the years in the area of eliminating and/or reducing the instances of child exploitation and abuse of all sorts.
“A seven-year-old with a hickey on her neck is bad and disturbing for me and this organization! This area had been condemned during the life of the previous government; I see nothing that they did in here. There is a place called Canal Bank, and that is another area which has more than 900 people living, and the concerns there are many also,” Miguel stressed.
She said she gets police support to take the 9- and 11-year-olds out of the discos, but the GWMO is able only to hold those children for 72 hours; and sometimes their parents do not show up, so those parents cannot be charged. She added also that when the 72 hours expire, the biggest problem is where to place the children, since there is no facility in the region to cater to that contingency, so the children eventually end up right back in the situations and environments from whence they were rescued.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
The issue of domestic violence is also a matter that the GWMA is battling with, in addition to protecting the rights of children. Reference was also made to a recent case wherein a man almost beat his wife to death in the community.
She said that when it comes to making a difference in Port Kaituma and the Matarkai Sub-Region, there is need for support and, if possible, the entire Region 1 needs support. She said the region is receiving a little support, and if that support was previously forthcoming, the region would have been a far better place with less problems.
On the issue of teenage pregnancy, Miguel said the instances might have been far lower had the welfare, probation and child protection officers had a presence in the area constantly. The issue the region has experienced, she admitted, is the location of the community and the cost to get there.
Based on her experience working in the community, she was asked what might be responsible for the children being victims of exploitation and teenage pregnancy.
Miguel’s explanation was as follows: “They get involved because they are not properly educated. At the school, there is a high rate of (truancy) and parents are the ones who ought to be blamed too! Because of the poverty in Port Kaituma, the children who used to work the mines every now and then to earn a small piece are now looking to get involved with the big businessmen for money, especially the girls.”
It was also pointed out that this problem spiked after the mining areas in Port Kaituma were ordered shut down by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC), who claimed that the residents were mining on the claims that were actually other persons’ (investors) claims.

Story and photo by Leroy Smith