Dear Editor,
I was making my way along the train line in the Half Mile/ Silvertown area when I stumbled upon one of the most brutal beatings of a woman I ever experienced. I was a teenager still attending secondary school. My destination was supposed to be Paddy Creek at West Watooka. I loved swimming there after school, sometimes on my own. I saw the man punch the woman so hard to the face she fell backwards and landed on her buttocks. He then kicked her in the face. She laid flat on the ground. He grabbed her up and as she stood shakily and dazed, he began punching her with his right fist while holding her with his left hand to prevent her from falling.
I was a diminutive child that hated violence. I never got into any real fights at school because my first inclination was to disappear from the scene and I achieved that feat by running as fast as I could.
I could not intervene to save her so I ran to the road, stopped a car and asked the driver if he was going in the direction of the police station at Wismar. The driver dropped me off and I ran into the station and told the policeman what I had experienced. The policeman is still around. I think he lives in West Watooka. I don’t recall his name. I would be lying if I told you how I got back to the scene of the beating with the policeman but when we got there the man was still beating the woman. That would have been fifteen minutes later.
The man saw us and ran in the direction of the big brown sand area that led to the main road in the vicinity of the Demerara River near the Mackenzie Bridge. We pursued him. The policeman stopped, aimed his revolver and fired a shot in the direction of the fleeing abuser. I saw him fall and thought he was hit but he had actually thrown himself to the ground and pretended to be dead. He was arrested and taken to the station. I went home worried that I could have caused a man to be shot and killed by law enforcement but the rage inside of me from what I saw that woman was subjected to by her abuser, quickly evaporated my worry about his mortality.
The abuser was from the One Mile area near the popular venue we called Rusty. I saw him years later at Ryan’s shop on the Mackenzie Market. He did not recognise me. He was gainfully employed at the bauxite company and I gathered that he had become a good citizen. I don’t know if he was jailed for that crime.
The darkness of physical abuse that envelopes women across Guyana is prevalent and must be put in check. Their unheard screams are drowned out by the acceptance of a culture that has no place in civilisation. The law must now become more stringent and the society must be adamant that this scourge must no longer be accepted. There is no excuse that can justify physical abuse of women and the perpetrators must be seen as monsters in human form that have no right to roam free in society.
Celebrities in Guyana must not be exempt from the full force of the law. In fact, their involvement in such inhumane and abhorrent crime must be dealt with with the severity that signals to all men in Guyana that we have arrived at the juncture where women are free not to be brutalised by men.
Sincerely yours,
Norman Browne
Social and Political Activist