Dear Editor,
Since the adult world is always wringing its hands over how to relate to young people, they may be interested in the experience of the members of Rights of Children (ROC) with the media in relation to its recent ROC-A-Thon to stop violence against women held on Sunday November 21st, 2010. The event was held on Sunday because the main participants were students who we know are generally unavailable during the school week. Despite the heavy rain and absence of most of the media, the march was very well-attended mainly by young people.
Three weeks before the event ROC sent an initial press release to all TV stations and daily newspapers. ROC followed this up with phone calls to journalists at Stabroek News. No media commented on it at all.
During the following three weeks, ROC organized students from sixteen secondary schools and UG to design and paint banners for the event. We designed and ordered 1000 wrist-bands online and we made local head-bands with the relevant theme. We are recovering the costs by selling the wrist-bands to students for $100 dollars and the head-bands for $40.00 each.
The second press release was sent to all of the newspapers – to the attention of Sunday editors – which contained all of the details relating to the ROC-A-Thon. ROC called the Sunday editor of Kaieteur News, once again it was not newsworthy enough to merit any space in the newspapers. ROC also filmed, edited and obtained sponsorship for an ad. However, NCN Channel 11 refused to run the ad: Mr. Ganraj Raghubeer, the Sales Manager wrote the following e-mail explanation: “Please note that the ROC advert was not approve (!) for the following reasons:
i. Incorrect pronunciation of the word ‘violence’.
ii. The time method needs to be metric.”
“Time method” refers the fact that the ad said the march would be at “3 pm” instead of “15:00hrs”.
We were also required to re-record the radio ad to change the 3pm to 15:00hrs.
The only newspaper media to cover our event was Kaieteur News, and for this we are grateful. However, in the first column the report states the event was organized by the ‘Rights of the Child Commission (ROC)‘, a completely different organization from “Rights of Children (ROC).” It then went into great detail about another upcoming event and to give all the necessary information for people who wanted to attend that event. Not only did they ignore our press releases, but they took the opportunity of covering our event as a way of advertising someone else’s event! We haven’t seen this ever done with events organized by adult organizations.
We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank our sponsors GT&T Co Ltd, Mings Products & Services Ltd, John Fernandes Limited & Impressions Inc. who played a great part in contributing to the success of our event.
We would also like to mention that requests for water/juice were sent out to our major beverage companies, namely; Banks DIH, DDL and Ansa McAL.
To date, after a lot of running around with Banks DIH, and DDL refusing to give support, we had to contend with two cases containing 24 mini bottles of Smalta from Ansa Mcal, and three cases each with 12 small bottles of water from private individuals. This event was held prior to the International Day (November 25).
What kind of message are they sending to us youths when these same beverage companies can be seen almost every day sponsoring, “street and road jams”, “village days”, “dancehall parties and fetes,”, and other alcoholic relating events? Yet they refuse to support an educational event organized by young people for young people.
‘Rights of Children’ (ROC) has been in existence for over 10 years and has always used the acronym ROC. ‘The Rights of the Child Commission’, on the other hand, has been active for a short period of time.
If the media wishes to refer to the Commission – preferably when it organizes its own events – please do so by the acronym ROCC or any other that the Commission so chooses, which does not confuse it with ROC.
Our event was successful because we worked with the schools directly, advertised and communicated mainly through Facebook where there are no editors deciding which organizations or events to promote or who meets their standards.
Yours faithfully,
Teshanna Cox
Rights of Children (ROC)
