Of all the reports of violence against women that have come to light in recent times, the incident at Enterprise, East Coast Demerara is the worst. It is unthinkable that a woman should be brutally assaulted for any reason and for any length of time. It is one million times worse when the abuser turns out to be her own child.
There have been reports made before about persons abusing their parents, grandparents and other elderly people for whom they might have assumed responsibility. There have been reports too about instances of abuse of elderly people residing in care homes. These abuses have taken all forms: neglect, verbal and physical and in some cases deliberate impoverishment. This was among the reasons that a National Commission on the Elderly was set up some years ago. However, not much has been heard about this commission in recent times.
In the case of Mrs Ramrattie Deonauth, the horrible details which emerged after her death and which were known to her other children and most likely their spouses and to her neighbours are spine tingling to say the least. Mrs Deonauth was the sole support of her sick husband who is confined to bed. She worked as a domestic to support herself and him and out of that meagre sum, given what the average domestic servant earns, was also expected to cater to the whims and fancies of her adult son. If she failed to do his bidding at any time, she was verbally and physically abused. The son, whose abuse of Mrs Deonauth apparently led to her death, it was said, was an alcoholic who constantly beat her and his paralyzed father whenever he was under the influence, which it would appear was fairly often.
It was revealed that reports of these beatings had been made to the police, but it appeared that the man was never charged because Mrs Deonauth would go to the police and plead for him to be released. This is nothing new, there have been many instances of battered women pleading for their attackers – usually their spouses/partners not to be charged or for the charges to be dropped after they would have appeared in court.
On the day Mrs Deonauth was killed, a second son revealed, neighbours had intervened when her older son had first started beating her because she had not prepared a meal for him. When he returned later and resumed the beating no one heard, or if they did no one bothered to intercede possibly because the physical abuse of Mr and Mrs Deonauth by their son was a regular occurrence.
Apart from the obvious atrocity of this situation, there are several issues that arise here. This clearly was a dysfunctional family — children turning a blind eye while one of their siblings regularly beat their parents is not a norm; certainly not in Guyana. But more than that, this is a dysfunctional community that seems to have grown immune to violence. The fact that no community leader or anyone of influence tried to arrest the situation, if not by appealing to the attacker when he was sober, then by counselling the mother who clearly displayed signs of battered women’s syndrome points to a worrying level of apathy that is being observed among our people. It seems we are no longer our brothers’ keepers.
But perhaps the biggest failures in this are the police. Reports were made on a number of occasions Mrs Deonauth’s son said why is it that regardless of her pleadings no one ever acted? It should have been obvious that this was a situation that had the potential to end the way it did. We are also led to believe that the police have been trained to refer domestic violence cases to the welfare authorities. How is it that this case fell through the cracks?
One would hope now that it has been given prominence that social services would have moved to provide the emotional and psychological support that Mr Deonauth and his other children so desperately need. And that constant monitoring would be carried out to ensure that he is being cared for.
