Professor Daizal Samad
HUMAN Trafficking is one of those dreadful topics about which we read in the media. With alarming frequency, it happens here in Guyana, and it happens elsewhere in the world. Human trafficking takes various heinous forms, one of the most heinous being the buying and selling of girls into prostitution. Many countries have, with good reason, come down very hard on this scourge. The perpetrators are hunted down and given their justifiably severe punishment. Human traffickers are justifiably considered the modern slavers.
Here at home, we witness that rapists are being punished with increasing severity. Good stuff! I have listened to too many facile conversations that focus simply on the number of years of incarceration. Some rapist of a five-year-old baby girl is given twenty-seven years, say. And our base reaction is something like this: “Bai! Dat magistrate is a BAD-MAN!” It is admiring, congratulatory.
There is nothing wrong with that at all, but conversations tend to stop there and move on to some other trivia about what some politician said to some other politician somewhere, or about something else. We speak in intimate terms about the politicians, as if we know them very well. We know who “deh wid who”, “how much money dem gat”, “who bad, who good.” We speak of Granger or Bharat as if they were our personal buddy pals. This is to be seen in various newspaper columns, articles, and letters as well. It is all so much hot air, really.
As a nation, we seem to have lost the ability to think analytically. We think and speak in terms of gossip, cheap and derivative, drawn from poorly written and more poorly read newspaper stuff. With rape and incest and human trafficking, we are even more dangerously shallow. No one with whom I have spoken — nor has anything I have read –- ever ventured ways to help that raped child heal. That is, apart from platitudes like “counselling.”
Charitably, one could say that this is one way to pass it off, to not deal with it, to not think about the horror. Uncharitably, perhaps, we could say that we are no longer capable of basic thought.
When I was Director of the University of Guyana Berbice Campus, we gave hampers each month to the elderly, the needy, and the handicapped. At Christmas, we gave gifts to fiscally disadvantaged children. At one point, an eight-year-old child puffed out her flat chest and explained her lateness: “I was with my HUSBAND!”
Your husband? She said she got married three years ago. It is rape!
A few years later, there was a woman in her thirties who (exactly like the child), puffed up herself and said: “I am a MARRIED woman, you know!” There were others present, and I had picked up her glass by mistake. She, too, had been raped. She was ten when she was sold off to her now “husband”. He had raped her, but the denial comes in the form of “Husbands can’t rape wives! It is the husband’s RIGHT!” Maybe it is also the husband’s right to beat, maim and kill wives. But in the eyes of the blind, deaf and dumb, these are “respectable people.” My goodness gracious!
The most insidious form of human trafficking is the selling of our victimized females to new owners as if they were dumb beasts. We sell them off into a lifetime of horror in the name of something that amounts to sanctioned rape.
It happens more often than we think.
