Just over a week ago, four girls all below the age of 18, and two under the age of 16, were rescued from a gold mining location in the interior, where it was reported they were being forced into prostitution. The first girl, who was rescued by members of the Guyana Women’s Miners Organisation (GWMO) detailed her harrowing ordeal.
She had been tricked into going into the interior as she had been told that she would be employed at a shop and that she would earn a great deal of money. The girl related that she made arrangements with a man, who was hiring for a woman, who was supposed to be the owner of the shop where she would work.
She travelled to the interior only to find that she had been lied to and that she was expected to have sex with men who would pay her in gold. She refused and said she was abused by the woman before she managed to escape and get a ride out of the area on a truck where she was forced to quietly endure the overt sexual advances of a passenger before being placed in the safe care of members of the GWMO.
It was her story, revealed in this newspaper, that saw the Ministry of Human Services moving to rescue the other three girls she had left at the mining camp.
The girls were all subsequently housed at a shelter by the ministry as they were then in the state’s care. But then a curious thing happened. Over the course of three days, the girls simply upped and left the shelter. One left first, the second left the next evening and on the third day, the last two girls fled together. They reportedly have returned to their parents’ care.
Curiouser, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice would have said, was the response of Minister of Human Services and Social Security Jennifer Webster. Judging not just the girls who escaped but other girls in their circumstances, she said that although her ministry does a lot of work in communities such as the one the girls are from, a lot of the girls lack morals. “Some of the girls want to be involved in it. They want to get engaged in prostitution,” she stated, adding that the society in general is a lawless one.
It was obvious that a few things had escaped the minister, one being that two of the girls are underage, which means that it is the state’s duty to protect them when their parents can’t, even from themselves. Is Minister Webster saying that if a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old decide that they want to “get engaged in prostitution” they should just be allowed to do so? Moreover, the girls she was being questioned about were in the care of her ministry’s staff. Is she saying then that her staff sat on their hands and just let them go to do whatever they want because they have, in the short space of less than a week, deemed them as beyond redemption? One hopes not.
All reports pointed to these four girls being victims of trafficking in persons. The man who misled them in order to procure them for the madam shopkeeper’s business must have been paid for his services. The woman who tutored them to ask the men who visited her shop for specific quantities of gold in exchange for sex and who told them that she would keep the gold for them was basically selling them to her customers. There is the implication too of the girls possibly contracting sexually transmitted diseases from these men or becoming pregnant and then ending up right back at the ministry as candidates for welfare assistance.
If, as Head of the Child Care and Protection Agency Ann Greene said, the unit is working with the girls and with their parents in their best interest then efforts should have been made to ensure that the girls were kept safe and away from the environment through which they were first exposed to danger – at least until the welfare and probation officers would have worked with them for some time and ensured that they had gotten through to both the girls and their parents at some level. One week was just not enough.
One hopes too that despite her objection to the word being used in this newspaper’s report published on Monday last, that Minister Webster was in fact enraged. The Minister ought to have been enraged at the fact that poverty and lack of supervision allowed these girls to be lured into prostitution. She should have been angry at the thought that a woman, who could have been the mother of any or all of them was prepared to exploit them in that manner. She most definitely should have been enraged that through ignorance, the girls were prepared to, and did leave the state’s care before the social workers had much of a chance to work with them.
You see one could begin to fathom a minister, who is also a woman and a mother, making the kind of statement she made if she is enraged at these things. One would find it hard to forgive a minister, who is also a woman and a mother saying such things in a cold, matter of fact and dismissive way.
We know Minister Webster is no politician – politicians are careful to say and do publicly, only those things that make them look good. We know she is a qualified technocrat minister, but abused children, battered women and welfare cases do not need technocracy. They need love and understanding. If Minister Webster remains implacable in the face of human failure, we would want to question the wisdom of her placement at this very sensitive ministry.
