Dear Editor,
We hold the position that all violence against children – including the violence of parents and other unwaged caregivers – is wrong and should be outlawed. Hence, when we saw the Sunday Kaieteur News headline: ‘Babysitter gets 60 months for assaulting one year old’, our first response was that the babysitter was totally wrong to hit the child, and that even if it were her child she should not have hit her. In other words, first we saw the assault of the child.
Then we were struck by the speed with which the matter was concluded by the police and the court. Within a matter of days, a 19-year-old was sentenced to jail for an action that the lawmakers of the country do not find it fit to outlaw and that the police are usually very reluctant to investigate. And this in a country where, as we know from the experience of the organisations we’ve worked with, cases often take years to get to court, never mind through it.
Thirdly, we were struck by the penalty – five years. This in a country where drug lords who are destroying young lives are not even arrested and vehicular manslaughter trials drag out for years with the guilty out on bail, free to continue endangering lives.
Even in a court system where sentences given by the courts sometimes appear irrational, this one must be the most irrational of all.
But is it irrational? One must assume that the speed of the response and the harshness of the penalty are related to the status of the offended parents, and the fact that the offender is assumed to be voiceless.
She is not voiceless.
We call on the Chancellor and other judicial authorities to reverse this inhumane, unreasonable and unbalanced sentence.
There will be more to say later.
Yours faithfully,
Andaiye and Karen de Souza,
Red Thread
Simona Broomes and
Urica Primus,
Guyana Women Miners
Organisation
Danuta Radzik and
Josephine Whitehead,
Help & Shelter
Jean La Rose,
Amerindian People’s
Association