Figures released by the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) last week reveal that a staggering 75% of the girls who were sent to the New Opportunity Corps (NOC) last year were sent there for wandering. By contrast, only seven per cent of the boys were there for wandering; the others had been found guilty of serious crimes such as grievous bodily harm.
The GHRA, in its statement, pressed again for the “non-criminal offence of wandering” to be scrapped, noting that it contributes to the discrimination against girls. Several organisations and individuals, including Head of the Child Care and Protection Agency Ann Greene, have also previously called for this offence to be scrapped. So far, all of the calls seem to have been ignored.
It should be noted that Guyana appears to be the only country in the world where this ridiculous, backward, so-called offence is used to incarcerate children. The closest international parallel found in online research referred to “wandering abroad” for which the offence is vagrancy, emanating from an obsolete 1824 English law called the Vagrancy Act. However, this law never targeted children. Adults were the ones who were charged with vagrancy for wandering abroad. What is referred to as wandering in Guyana is called running away elsewhere in the world. Millions of children, boys and girls, run away from their homes every day all around the world for different reasons. Most often, when children run away it’s because of problems with their families—arguments with parents over various issues to the extent where the child feels he or she would be better off elsewhere. Other reasons include physical, emotional or sexual abuse in the home, the child and/or parents drinking alcohol or taking drugs, the child failing or dropping out of school.
A huge issue concerning mostly girls, involves them attracting the attention of older men and being groomed and eventually lured away from their homes. This eventually leads to statutory rape. In most countries in the world, when this occurs, the adult is arrested and prosecuted. In Guyana, unfortunately, although the current law makes provision for the adult to be prosecuted, it is the child who is placed before the courts and usually sent to the NOC for wandering.
The GHRA has also called for an end to this. In not so many words, it encouraged law enforcement to start charging with grooming, older men who encourage young girls to run away from home, projecting that “Laying ‘grooming’ charges against serial offenders should have a sobering effect on others.” However, experience with the way justice works in Guyana dictates that laying charges will not be enough, there must be follow through. And in order to do this, resources must be made available to address the issue of girls who wander, including thorough investigations into why they are running away, what they are running from and who they are running to.
This is a role that should be taken up fully by the Ministry of Social Protection, possibly through the Child Care and Protection Agency, which to date, given its limitations and the vastness of the issue, has largely been reactive. The children it manages to ‘rescue’ have for the most part already been victimised and the older they are the more difficult it is to reach them.
Children who feel unloved or misunderstood are very easy targets for predators. They are already looking for love, affirmation and a sense of belonging elsewhere and will quickly leave their parents’ homes to go where they believe they will be accepted. Unfortunately, society has been prone to labelling such children, especially girls, as promiscuous and rather than offering them help by way of counselling and therapy chooses to incarcerate them.
The GHRA, in its statement, referred to unacceptable conditions at the Juvenile Holding Centre at Sophia, where “magistrates usually opt to remand wanderers.” The facility houses boys and girls aged 12 to 16 years old and consists of cells for girls on one flat and for boys on the other, with no facilities for any activity whether indoor or outdoor. It said the staff do their best to mount educational programmes and provide “intermittent counselling.” Children can be left there any time from a week to several months, depending on the magistrates’ schedules, the GHRA said.
From Sophia, after a court hearing, for many children there is a single track which leads to the NOC, located at Onderneeming, Essequibo Coast, which falls not under the Ministry of Social Protection, but under the Ministry of Education. This institution has been on the radar in recent years following allegations of abuses meted out to the children housed there. It is the lone institution in the country where juvenile offenders are sent. In the past, the authorities have been vehement in their defence of it being classified as a prison. They have insisted that it is a rehabilitation institution where the children attend school and are taught skills. But there is a great amount of stigma attached to the NOC. Therefore if there are success stories, no one gets to hear them.
There has to be a better way to deal with children who are preyed on and one hopes that those in authority would have already begun to address this heartrending issue.
