Dear Editor,
Nothing can make up for the last tortured year of Neesa Gopaul’s life and the failure of adults to give her the help she asked for; the least we can do now is to face her without defensiveness, scapegoating and/or political game-playing.
Minister Manickchand has initiated an investigation into the breaching of protocols by officers of the Child Care and Protection Agency who allegedly failed to report to supervisors that they had lost contact with Neesa. Minister Rohee has blamed the Leonora Police Station and the community policing groups of D division in West Demerara. Dr Luncheon proclaimed that “a range of entities” were at fault. On his own behalf or on behalf of the Cabinet, he also found that the Sexual Offences Act and other aspects of the criminal law “all failed to operate in the interests of this young child,” apparently unaware that the structures and procedures to implement the Sexual Offences Act have not yet been put in place.
The old Minister Manickchand (she’s changed) would have been open to the view that while the tragedy of Neesa Gopaul is unique in the horror of it, there is a broader failure to protect our children in spite of all the good legislation we have passed.
To address domestic and sexual violence against the vulnerable, the government has prioritized legislation and produced laws which have often been well in advance of the laws in other parts of the region. But as has been remarked repeatedly, laws are only a beginning. Our co-worker Alissa Trotz made the point in her Diaspora column on Monday October 11 that what we have to face is that as laws proliferate, so does the violence. We don’t pretend to understand all the reasons why but for now, we want to raise examples of two kinds of issues that must be faced, practical and political.
First. the practical:
Laws need to be supported by the mechanics of implementation, which is where the first failing lies. It is quite possible that the investigation will find that officials of the Child Care and Protection Agency breached protocols. Red Thread as just one organization has its own experience of officers of the Ministry of Human Services and those of the police and courts ignoring protocols. Or it might find that the fault lies with supervisors. Whatever conclusion it reaches, we know that there are incompetent, uncaring check-back-tomorrow bureaucrats in the various protective services. We also know that the services do some good work, although whether one’s business is dealt with well can seem largely a function of luck. But anyone accessing the social welfare system would also recognize that it is seriously under-skilled, under-resourced and over-tasked. The laws we are so rightly proud of in fact add to the officers’ burden of work, without a proportionate rise in resources to do the work. Officers have too many cases, and are responsible for too much territory. They are inadequately supported by other institutions, for example, by the Ministry of Education honouring its promise to have a welfare officer in every school. The physical environment in which they deal with those who come to them for help does not reflect a valuing of caring work – either the unwaged caring work of the parents and guardians who consult the services, or the waged caring work of the child protection officers, both groups mainly women. There are no built-in arrangements for the officers to receive the emotional support they need after the hours they spend dealing with other people’s crises. Nothing in all this helps to produce what we need – social workers who are not narrow bureaucrats but people who are passionately on the side of the vulnerable, with the skills to support children staying with their families/mothers as long as this is the best option, and to save children from their families/mothers where this is necessary. In the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security as in other ministries, it is too easy to lay blame (only) at the door of individual officers at whatever level while the government responsible for providing the conditions in which they can work effectively is not held accountable and does not hold itself accountable.
Laws also have to be supported by an informed public. Minister Manickchand has made much of the protocols which were not observed in the case of Neesa Gopaul. It would help if the protocols were not treated like a secret but made public knowledge. All public agencies which have contact with the vulnerable or injured need to publish the protocols and procedures for dealing with reports and complaints, to begin with schools, health centres, hospitals, social services, and police. We must know what we have a right to expect from these agencies, and we must have some place where we can effectively appeal if the promised attention is not being given to a matter. In other words, we must demand that the system open up to organized monitoring from outside to ensure that weaknesses and malpractices are corrected before more tragedies occur.
These practical steps would help. The legal reform of which many have repeatedly spoken and written is essential. But none of this would be enough. Laws designed to protect children, in particular, can reduce their vulnerability only when the work of caring for children, whether one’s own children or the children of other parents, is counted; and when the society does not find it acceptable that so many poor people, in particular mothers, are earning money to feed their children under conditions that force them to neglect their children’s other needs – earning money as security guards with 12 hour shifts, or as waitresses in small restaurants sometimes with shifts as long as 16 hours, or as migrant workers who leave behind children who have to look after themselves for weeks, months, and even years.
And finally here, political will demonstrated in more than good legislation is also required. Laws designed to protect the vulnerable against abuse also have to be supported by an unshakeable political will that those who are abused will be defended regardless of the power of their abusers. What we have instead is an attitude that says that “if the abuser is one of us, we duck the issue; if he is one of them we go after him.”
As we said, nothing can make up for the last tortured year of Neesa Gopaul’s life and the failure of adults to give her the help she asked us for – but we can try to identify and implement the reforms we need, which go far deeper than defensiveness, scapegoating or political game-playing are willing to see.
Yours faithfully,
Andaiye
Karen de Souza
Red Thread
