One of the reasons why life in Guyana remains perilous for women and girls has to do with the ignorance that still surrounds law enforcement and sadly officialdom as well. It is reflected in the crassness that is sometimes evident in the less-than-thoughtful responses to perfectly logical questions and the fact that sometimes no one bothers to call officials out on their seeming ignorance.
Early this month, this newspaper carried a report in which Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan was asked about the Guyana Police Force’s mishandling of domestic violence cases. This was in view of a recent case where a Berbice woman was murdered after a police officer had left her alone with her abusive husband. The officer had been deputed by the court to ensure that the woman safely collected her belongings from the marital home and the woman’s relatives subsequently filed a complaint. Minister Ramjattan’s response was both thoughtless and careless and, quite frankly, based on balderdash.
He was quoted as saying, “Policemen again are law enforcement officers and are trained for that. Now, we will have to expand this thing and that is what we are trying to do…There is lots of training going on especially with the women police [on] how to deal with these domestic violence cases. We have men too who are involved in the programme.”
Yes, really. The Minister of Public Security really spoke as if domestic violence is not an age-old scourge that has already taken the lives of countless women and maimed innumerable more. Minister Ramjattan referred to domestic violence as a “social issue”, when it is in fact also a law enforcement issue. Domestic violence is a crime and while it has been and is being dealt with at a societal level, the main reason for this stems from the entrenchment of patriarchy, wherein women are seen as men’s property to be done with as they see fit. Too many women’s tears are being shed daily over this endemic evil, for this not to be taken seriously, but surely Minister Ramjattan was jesting?
It turned out that he was not speaking humorously at all when he continued: “Policemen now got to be doctor… accountant… a social worker too, that knows a thing or two about domestic violence.” And therein lies the problem. If this is how the brutalizing and murdering of women at the hands of their partners is seen by the minister in charge of the agency that is expected to protect them then women’s lives are indeed in serious peril.
The point is that police officers should never attempt to be any of the things the minister mentioned above. They should be trained to do their jobs, which would include arresting, charging and placing before the courts those who have committed acts of violence, whether domestic or otherwise. Leave the adjudicating to the courts and the social work to those who are trained to do it.
It is mind-boggling that in 2018, members of the Guyana Police Force are still having training sessions on handling domestic violence cases. In the same report that quoted Minister Ramjattan, human rights activist, Vidyaratha Kissoon questioned this and quiet rightly so. Mr Kissoon had been associated with Help and Shelter, a non-governmental organisation leading the fight against domestic and other types of violence in Guyana, since its inception in 1995. He has first-hand knowledge about the training that was afforded the police since in the 90s.
He stated that modules had been developed for police training and that some were still available. This was in the face of an advertisement by the Public Security Ministry, under the Inter-American Development Bank-funded Citizen Security Strengthening Programme, for a consultant to train police on responding to cases of domestic violence, including “developing a comprehensive training module”, which addresses the skills and knowledge that would enable the police to “demonstrate the requisite levels of professionalism, empathy, and integrity” when dealing with incidents of domestic violence. The consultancy, which will last six months, the advertisement said, also includes the training of 120 police ranks and public officials.
Again this is absolute balderdash and a case of reinventing the wheel. The modules on domestic violence to which Mr Kissoon referred ought to have been incorporated into the core police training years ago. Instead, the previous government was paying lip service to ‘stamping out domestic violence’.
Furthermore, what would be the point of training 120 police officers, particularly given the force’s attrition rate? Minister Ramjattan, his ministry and the government need to try pulling another one as this one fell far short. Truly, no one is that gullible, and women deserve better.