By Desiree Kissoon
The economic status of women in Guyana poses a serious problem, says United States Chargé d’Affaires Bryan Hunt.
Speaking with Stabroek News on Wednesday prior to the preliminary results of the may 11th general elections being announced, Hunt said that he did not anticipate that US programmes here would change significantly under the newly elected government. However, he said, more work needs to be done on some major issues. One such issue is the empowerment of women to enable them to improve their economic status.
According to him, “…the economic status of women across the board in Guyana is a serious problem whether they are victims of gender-based violence or not. The US’s most senior diplomat in Guyana said that it is very clear that Guyanese women face lower earning potential than men do over the course of their lives.
“There is not yet sufficient focus on trying to close that gender gap within the work place,“ he said.
According to him, the US mission here is in active discussion with various private sector organisations to find ways to minimise that gap. He said that the US has done a number of programmes designed to help women who wish to become entrepreneurs. These included many training programmes here and in the US. Hunt noted that economic viability has to be a priority across the board and most certainly for gender-based victims.
He said that US has spoken with the various organisations that work on this issue, about the need to find durable solutions for these women. However, he said, while everyone agrees on what is to be done, the challenge is that the Guyanese economy is not creating sufficient jobs to absorb even the new entrants coming out of college much less those women who are now deciding that they wish to enter the formal workforce. He said a lot more work needs to be done to create those opportunities. The US also plans to work, “quite a bit” with at-risk youths in trying to help them to obtain the skills necessary to enter the workforce as productive members of society.
Democracy
Hunt noted that although the USAID-funded Leadership and Democracy Programme (LEAD), will come to an end in June, the US would continue to look for opportunities to engage with all of the political stakeholders to try to strengthen the democratic process and to broaden that process outwards.
“…Ultimately the LEAD programme will come to an end in June, but that particular programme has completed its work. Our hope is to work with the government in order to find a way forward, to engage through new intervention in that area and hopefully to do some work on trying to overcome this very ingrained divide within the Guyanese political system,” he said. Hunt noted that the new government must work in the best interest of all Guyanese people.
Security
According to Hunt, the US would continue to focus its efforts on the Caribbean Security Basin Initiative to help Guyana and the region confront the crime and violence problems that exists.
In terms of the problem of narco-trafficking, He said that the US has a very active collaborative relationship on the technical level with the Customs Anti Narcotic Unit, the Serious Organised Crime Unit and the Police Anti-Narcotics unit. He said that this collaboration would continue in efforts to take out of commission the various narcotics organizations that are using Guyana’s territory.
Hunt declared that these efforts are bearing fruits and referred to what he described as “a significant uptake” in the number of seizures of cocaine moving through Guyana. According to him, this was as a result of the “new collaborative international efforts that we (the US) hope will continue.”
He said that the recent establishment of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office in Guyana is a major plus in the drug fight. DEA personnel would continue to work out of the US embassy. Hunt disclosed that these agents are currently on temporary duty, but that there would be permanent staffing of the office sometime later this year.
Prosecution of major
drug players
The diplomat noted that the US has been working to try to find ways to improve the investigative and prosecutorial services within Guyana when it comes to major drug players. “We have an ongoing cooperative effort in order to look at training of judges and magistrates. We also have ongoing support to the forensic laboratory to try to increase the quality of evidence the prosecutorial service receives,” he said.
“We fully anticipate that we would be able to move forward with a broader judicial assistance package that would focus on helping prosecutors and police build credible cases that can go before the judicial system and yield increased conviction rates,” Hunt noted.
Domestic violence
In response to a query on the handling of reports of gender-based violence, he said that the US is actively engaged in training of law enforcement officers in dealing with and responding to reports of these crimes. Hunt said that this is being done with the collaboration of the Pennsylvania State Police who have a partnership with one of the divisions of the police in Georgetown. He said the focus is heavily on the appropriate handling of special-victims crime including gender-based violence, sexual assault, cases of rape and cases of human trafficking. “They have an ongoing training and assistance programme to try to improve significantly the handling of those cases,” he said.
According to him, there are already new guidelines that have been drafted for line officers and more senior officers in the handling of those cases. “Simultaneously, we have been working with various civil society groups around the country providing support for their efforts to educate on domestic violence and to increase community and police engagement on the issue. All with the message that gender-based violence is a serious crime and must be treated as such and we must prosecute those that are guilty of it if we are to eliminate it from the Guyanese society”, he said.
Hunt said that while the US is working closely with a number of organisations that provide assistance to victims of domestic violence, victims would still be at risk unless their abusers are prosecuted and convicted.
“The crux of the matter is that while these organisations are doing incredible work in removing the victims out of dangerous situations, without the ability to actually prosecute and convict the offender those victims are still going to end up at risk,” he noted.
Legislation
Hunt also noted that the new government would need to look comprehensively at legislation, not only in terms of gender-based violence, but also on rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and trafficking in persons (TIP). “I think there are things that legislatively could be done to increase the effectiveness of the prosecution of such crimes. I think that there are definitely things that could be looked at on the penalty phase to ensure that they are significant to be a deterrent to such crimes,” he said.
According to him, more needed to be done for Guyana to meet minimum standards. “We have found consistently now for several years that government needed to increase their efforts in order to show significant progress towards meeting those minimum standards,” he said.
He said that additional prosecutions and convictions of persons engaged in people trafficking revealed a significant change from previous years.
According to him, the US was in the process of compiling its next State Department report, but was not sure if Guyana had done enough to improve its tier ranking.
Over the years Guyana has been severely criticized for its treatment of the crime of trafficking in persons. The country has been given poor ranking on its response to TIP.
