Members of the Guyana Women Miners Organisation (GWMO) on Friday rescued five teenagers from communities in the Cuyuni River, in Region Seven, where they were working in the commercial sex industry.
Among them was a girl who was rescued by the organisation last year in Mahdia.
President of the organisation Simona Broomes said her team, with the help of police in the area, removed the girls—a 16-year-old and four 17-year-olds—as the Combating of Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Act 2005 makes it clear that any person under the age of 17 found working as a prostitute was in fact being trafficked.
“We want the law to be adhered to and this year we are going to do this. These girls have no place working in the interior as prostitutes,” Broomes told Stabroek News yesterday from Bartica, shortly after she arrived there with the girls.
She said they had contacted the Ministry of Human Services & Social Security TIP hotline and informed them of the rescue of the teenagers while the police at the Bartica Police Station took statements. Late yesterday afternoon, they left Bartica in company of a GWMO member for Parika, where it was expected that personnel from the Human Services Ministry would have received them.
Broomes recalled that at one of the many shops where they stopped in the area, the owner asked whether a 17-year-old with a child could still be trafficked. She said they explained the law to the woman and removed the girl from the shop. She said the teenager indicated that she could not take care of her child and eventually went into the interior to work and over the months she has been moving from shop to shop. This victim was rescued from a shop in the Aranka Front community.
‘Nothing has changed’
It was at Arangai, Broomes said, that they met the victim they had rescued last year. Upon seeing them, the girl jumped through a window of the brothel she was in and attempted to escape but she was caught by the police accompanying them. She said the teenager, who was 16 last year when they rescued, said that she had not heard “back anything from the Ministry of Human Services and that she was doing nothing and she had no money….”
“Nothing has changed for her from since she left Mahdia to now,” Broomes noted.
In that same area, three girls were rescued. Broomes said one of the teenagers, who is also a mother, spoke about being forced to leave home at age 14 after she got pregnant and about being sexually and physically abused by her step-father. She left her child in the care of a sister and travelled to the interior to work.
The youngest is from the North West and she is not on speaking terms with her parents. She related that she was living with a woman who arranged for her to travel to the interior to work.
“All of the stories were heartrending and here again we are hoping that these girls would be given a second chance,” Broomes said, before adding that she believes some of the victims may be younger than they claim.
She said officers at the Bartica Police Station yesterday started to contact relatives of the girls, asking that they produce their birth certificates to verify their ages. The officers asked the relatives to take the documents to the nearest police station. The police in the Cuyuni area were very supportive over the two and a half days they spent in the communities, Broomes observed.
Awareness
Broomes was very concerned about a woman who is known to bring females from Venezuela and Dominica to work in the area. She said initially the woman, who claims she was born in Dominica but spent most of her years in Guyana, brought the females to work in people’s shops but now she owns a shop and the females work for her. According to Broomes, five foreign nationals were observed working in the woman’s shop and none of them had work permits as the woman claimed she is having the documents processed. Broomes questioned how the females were brought into the country.
Broomes and 10 other members of her organisation were on an awareness campaign in the Cuyuni River and she said they stopped at all the communities along the river bank. She revealed that reaching the area was a big challenge for them as not only is it very expensive to travel there, but it also has some of the most treacherous rapids in the interior, which pose risk to life and limb.
While they had hoped to travel by plane, Broomes said, there is no public airstrip in the area and so they were forced to travel by river. During the trip, she also said, they were forced to change from their outboard powered boat to canoes in order to access some areas.
While in the area, they stopped at over 100 shops and spoke to owners, prostitutes, miners and other workers, sensitising them on the TIP law and also about safe mining practices.
Some women complained about being robbed while they are left sometimes alone at mining camps when they men go off to mine.
One woman spoke about being robbed and beaten earlier this month when two men drove up in an outboard powered boat and entered the camp she was in.
Broomes voiced gratitude to the British High Commission for making the trip possible with a grant of just over $3.2 million.
She said the organisation had applied for the grant last year and it was approved early this year. Members also spent another $300,000 of their own money since they were forced to bring out additional persons from the communities.
