Dear Editor,
The spectre of a ‘resident evil,’ which lay dormant during the period of the late administration, has suddenly surfaced with a vengeance, and has assumed a new name, which is ‘Violence and death to women and girls.’
A fifteen-year-old female on her way to school at about 8:30 hours, joins a mini-bus (public transport); she is drugged, raped, and thrown off in the vicinity of the historic Stabroek Market.
A beautician is murdered, and three women are slashed to death over the Valentine period. Numerous cases of carnal knowledge and incest are making the headlines quite frequently. The list of violence against women in our society is unending.
I have encountered some difficulty in linking a period in our society with the present, when such violence against women was the norm.
Violence has become endemic within our society. A disagreement between school age children is no longer settled with fists; weapons, such as bricks, a piece of wood, a knife and even a cricket bat are now used to settle disputes.
The church and school have become total failures in the nurturing of positive values in the society; a writer quite recently said that the church is more interested in amassing wealth, than in saving souls.
What can we do to stem this violence?
Family values need to be resuscitated; the churches need to be more proactive, take the lead, speak out against falling standards and social inequities; television stations need to revisit their programmes and refrain from having movies that extol violence or advertisements which use women as sex objects to sell their products, and music videos which border on the obscene, including the wining culture videos, which are an insult to all Guyanese women.
Our women are an integral part of our society. The violence against them must stop.
Yours faithfully,
C Vaughn
MSM Major (Rtd)
