Survey to determine reasons perpetrators abuse children to commence soon – CCPA

While some are of the view that perpetrators of child abuse suffer from some form of mental health illness, the Child Care and Protection Agency (CCPA) is in the process of commencing a survey to determine the root causes of this social scourge with the aim of preventing them from occurring in the future.

The Director of the agency, Ann Greene, in a recent interview with Guyana Times, admitted that currently, the CCPA does not take on the responsibility of sitting down with abusers to find out the reasons for their behaviour.
However, with abuse cases seemingly sky-rocketing in the past few years, this venture has now become more necessary than ever.
“Personally, we don’t [converse with perpetrators] but the whole processing of a perpetrator, even when they go to the prison, they have to analyse the man because you going there for rehabilitation so when they enter prison these things got to be done. If you are a child abuser, they need to be evaluated and find out what’s happening so they can do the whole rehabilitation. So, it is not done say by us but to tell you that people who abuse children something got to be wrong”, Greene stated.
As a consequence, the Child Care Director spoke of the need for the survey, which will hopefully commence soon in the prisons, to learn why abusers resort to these acts.
“There is a mental issue and, in fact, I am looking at doing a research this year to show something. I am hoping to do a research this year and go into the prisons and talk to all those serious offenders to prove something that I have done a literature review on it but I am actually going to do a research to really come out with some evidence because people who abuse children, you got to got some mental health issues”.
Last year, over 4900 cases of child abuse were recorded. In fact, the CCPA noted that by the end of October 2018, the agency had already responded to 4352 child abuse reports, which happens to be the highest number of reported cases ever for the period.
In fact, a 25.4 per cent increase was recorded when compared with figures for the same period of the previous year. Only recently, a report conducted by Child Link revealed that there have been three times the sexual violence cases against boys, while girls continue to be the dominant victims of such acts. (Davina Ramdass)