Seventeen-year-old Anthony Richard drowned the other day in a sea of mud. Working in a mine at Puruni in the North West, the face of the pit wall collapsed and buried him.
It is not the first time such accidents have happened in an industry that seems to adhere to no safety standards and thanks to the money it generates (while destroying the environment) is protected from almost any government oversight.
At seventeen, Richard should not have been working such a job. Nor should have 13-year-old Rovin Williams who was crushed by a canter driven by the businessman he was employed with on the Essequibo Coast.
These are just two anecdotes which add human faces to the statistics provided by the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2019/20 and its section covering young people’s welfare, exposure to exploitation and violence.
Anthony and Rovin should have been in school but as the survey indicates 29.3% of boys and 20.5% of girls aged sixteen at the beginning of the school year are not attending. This is higher in rural (18.8%) and interior (26.6%) locations than in urban (12.9%) areas. There are also marked variations when one factors in the educational levels of parents and their ethnicities.
With the need for money probably behind this absenteeism, child labour practices are still widespread despite the government having committed to eliminate it by 2025 through the country’s first national Child Labour Policy launched in 2019. The MICS states that “Children in the interior regions (Regions 1, 7, 8 and 9 specifically) of Guyana represent higher percentages of child labour cases, according to the Guyana MICS 2019-2020 data. As a result, the majority of these cases have been noted amongst the Indigenous populations who predo-minantly reside in these regions. These regions also represent the main mining jurisdictions within the country, which has facilitated some of the worst forms of child labour in Guyana.”
One in five male children, aged 5 to 17 and living in the interior are engaged in what is deemed hazardous work .This might include working with dangerous tools or explosives or carrying heavy loads.
For those girls not in school, marriage is always an option even though the MICS survey states that before the age of 18 (it) is a violation of human rights. “The right to ‘free and full’ consent to a marriage is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – with the recognition that consent cannot be ‘free and full’ when one of the parties involved is not sufficiently mature to make an informed decision about a life partner.”
Despite this, out of the 5887 women surveyed aged 20-24 years, 6.3% were first married or in a union before 15 years and 32.3% before they were 18.
In Region Eight some 12.2% of women were married or entered into a union before aged 15 and 42.2% before 18. As for the age disparity between these “child brides” and their husbands, over one third of the men were five years or older.
And like a horse and carriage once there’s marriage there’s going to be domestic violence apparently. The survey avoids asking directly about domestic violence but rather looks at attitudes towards it by men and women as an indicator of how prevalent it might be. Fully 10% of women and men age 15-49 years “state that a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife in at least one of the following circumstances: (1) she goes out without telling him, (2) she neglects the children, (3) she argues with him, (4) she refuses sex with him, (5) she burns the food”. In fact looking more closely the answer is there, with almost half of assaults on women being reported as “occurring in the home” (43.8%) or “in another home” (7.9%).
Nor is it much safer outside of their houses: only 56.7% of women aged 15-49 years report feeling safe walking alone in their neighbourhood after dark. Justifiably so, since 9.1% of women aged 15-49 years reported experiencing physical violence of assault or robbery in the last three years – urban (12.4%) to rural (8%). For young men aged between 18 and 29 almost one in five had experienced violence in the same context.
The MICS statistics are very granular. For example what percentage of the latest robbery incidents reported by women were with: no weapon (65.9%) with a knife (17.8%) with a gun (7.4%)? Also only 56% of those types of robberies were reported to the police. Perhaps that should be taken into account when the police department brings out its “ever declining” crime statistics.
Like a pointillist painting each one of these numbers contributes to what is, sadly, a grim but highly informative picture of 21st century life in Guyana. For many young Guyanese their existence here is brutish and dangerous whether at home or at work. It is no wonder they are still migrating because in the end, more money, roads or bridges will not equate to improved welfare and personal safety. Just as coding, SMART schools and Spanish lessons will not reduce the school dropout rate.
This government, which inexplicably delayed the release of the MICS, should now sit down and really read it, not defensively nor with an eye to scoring cheap political points. Just read it. Many of these statistics have not and will not change significantly based on whoever is in power. They are longitudinal, they are indicators of societal symptoms that are based in part on old cultures, old beliefs, old values.
But it is the duty of any government to break these down. It requires a massive and sustained effort, so as to forge a society that is based on the rights of its citizens, and in particular its young people, to safety, to better educational opportunities and kinder, gentler lives.