We cannot afford to wait any longer! We must read a riot act against those miscreants who sate their twisted sexual pleasures by molesting our children and leaving ugly physical and mental scars on their young lives. And we must do it now! We’re not talking about the government here. We’re talking about me and you. Let’s leave the government institutions to their policies and their workshops and their legislation that accomplishes little if anything and get down to the business of saving our children. Let’s take to the streets! We have done so for things of lesser importance! Let’s bring the whole sickening affair out in the open! Let’s put sexual molestation on the agendas of PTA meetings! Let’s start really finding out what happens in those orphanages and school dorms across the country! Let’s see who’s hiding what! Let us put the perverts on the back foot!
Let’s leave the politicians to their business of awarding multi-million dollar contracts and checking every pumpkin that we export to Barbados for cocaine and counting the cost of the Amaila Falls Project and the Skeldon Sugar Factory and fighting over who should be the Speaker of the National Assembly and deciding who will run the Guyana Cricket Board. Those are what the politicians call matters of state. Let us deal with the state of our children!
We can no longer go around burying our heads in the mud. We cannot wish the perverts away. They exist in every nook and cranny; sometimes in the most unlikely nooks and crannies. Look it up on the internet! Some of the most twisted child molesters are actually upstanding citizens and people with power and money and influence and good political connections. They succeed in robbing our children of their innocence and inflicting physical and emotional pain upon them because they are big and powerful and upstanding, because we don’t suspect them and because at the end of the day they are powerful enough to get away with it. That’s the way it works in our might is right society.
The truth is that we are yet to rid ourselves completely of the idea that sexual molestation only occurs in what one might call low places. It’s easy to make a song and dance when some maladjusted young man in some backwater village is caught having his way with a child from the village behind a pit latrine. The profile fits the crime. It’s easy to beat half the life out of the poor miscreant then turn him over to the police for another dose. It’s not that easy, however, when we discover that ‘nice’ people, ‘good upstanding citizens’ offering sweets and money from the windows of their fancy cars have the same urgings. Nor is it easy when we discover that ‘nice’ homes are dens of iniquity where the same sickening things that happen like in abandoned bus sheds and run-down cottages. And we always act surprised when some “dutiful and dedicated teacher” gets exposed. That’s the problem! Ugly things are only supposed to be perpetrated by ugly people in ugly places. The fault lies with our socialization. Money and power equals morality.
If we want to save our children we must adjust our thinking. We must now start to look for perversion in the exalted places too. We must warn our children that it’s not only nice people who drive SUV’s and that bad people turn up in all sorts of attractive disguises. We must tell them that suits and ties and good manners and the inviting back seats of fancy cars are not always what they appear to be.
How much do we talk about sexual molestation……..really bring the thing out into the open? What about bringing it up at PTA meetings? That’s where the stakeholders meet to talk about fund-raising and how the children are doing in school and about things like lateness and punctuality. Couldn’t we talk about what our children ought to be looking out for too? Couldn’t we reinforce these things at Monday morning Assembly in schools? What about if we hear from the President and the Minister of Education and the Human Services Minister on this issue more regularly? How about a zero tolerance policy on molesting children like the zero tolerance policy on corruption in the gold industry? What about if we cease to make distinctions between backyard molesting of children and when the same thing occurs in some more salubrious environment………. in some institution where the offenders are supposed to be care-givers? What about abandoning this whole sickening ‘policy’ of treating the rich and powerful miscreants differently to how we treat the poor and the powerless ones. What about the Ministry of Natural Resources applying the same level of vigilance to child labour in the Goldfields that they promise to apply to miners who transgress the LCDS policy? What about having our teachers trained to spot signs of sexual molestation? What about running a periodic check on schools where children sleep in dorms and orphanages where children have no option but to stay?
Jennifer and Priya……… you need to have heart to heart talks with the parents. Some of them will tell you that they are so terrified for their children that they are seriously circumscribing their social lives. In many cases no football practice after school! No karate classes! No music lessons! No dance classes! No visits to friends’ homes! A cloak of suspicion has descended on everyone outside the tightest family circle. Uncles, and cousins and God Fathers are under suspicion too. “My eight year-old son’s friend’s father could be a serial child molester.” That’s how paranoid some of us have become. And even if you have to walk from downtown Georgetown to Better Hope after school no rides in the backs of cars from nice people. That’s how sick our society has become.
