Power sharing should be seriously discussed - Debbie Backer
Help and Shelter in continuing bid to raise awareness of domestic violence

By Gitanjali Singh
Stabroek News
February 4, 2000


Violence, especially against women, according to a Help and Shelter volunteer is on the rise in the country due primarily to "increased stress levels".

The organisation, according to counsellor Vidya Kissoon, is in the process of raising, through public awareness campaigns, the issue of domestic violence. He stated that the issue was commonplace in society, but only highlighted through media sensationalism when tragedies of the type at Bush Lot, West Coast Berbice on Monday night occur. An enraged husband killed himself after injuring his wife and shooting dead three in-laws.

The campaign, Kissoon said, should take the form of radio and television discussions and serials, public sessions with workers at their places of employment and hopefully at schools. Help and Shelter is also in the process of involving trade unions which have access to a large segment of the population through their representation of their employment interests.

Community outreach programmes and counselling of victims of abuse form part of the organisation's work, Kissoon said. The organisation is staffed by five full-time officers, including a coordinator and counsellor. All other persons involved are volunteers.

Questioned on the assistance if any to be rendered to the survivors of the Bush Lot murders, Kissoon said that the body would only respond to requests for assistance from the community. He said that those areas already had built-in mechanisms for dealing with crises of that kind, these included church groups and other community groups who participate in social issues. He stressed that Help and Shelter was not in the habit of going into areas uninvited as this constituted an invasion of privacy.

Kissoon said, however, that avenues were open to those affected by tragic circumstances to benefit from counselling. They could call the Help and Shelter hotline # 78454, which had been established specifically for that purpose.

The Bush Lot tragedy saw Yagroop Persaud, following a domestic dispute with his wife Ashmattie, fatally shoot her sister Praboutie Jodha and her husband Jailall Jodha and a cousin Daneswar Bajnauth who tried to intervene. Persaud was unsuccessful in his attempt to kill his wife, succeeding in wounding 13-year-old Melissa Bajnauth in the process. Persaud then took his own life.

These killings are the latest in a series of domestic-related murders to have rocked the nation in recent times. As recent as November 8, last year Lalta Persaud Singh, brutally chopped his mother Kissoondai Singh at Stanleytown, West Bank Demerara. The wounds were inflicted following what reports said was a family dispute over a piece of jewellery loaned by her to his wife. Persaud himself drank a weedicide and subsequently jumped from a window at the West Demerara Regional Hospital before dying some hours later. The mother died the next day at the Georgetown Hospital.

Some two weeks later on the evening of November 22, jealousy was seen as the key factor in the stabbing to death of 30-year-old Sohan Basdeo called 'Vicky', of Best Village, West Coast Demerara. His death was similar in circumstance to the recent one in that it was during a wedding.