Woodley Park was only the most recent arena of cultural violence. The abuse and assault of school children on 17th February was a frightening rerun of the injuries inflicted on school children at Bath Settlement, Bush Lot and Cotton Tree Villages (in Reg. No.5) on 6th March 2020.
Similar simultaneous lawlessness at Canal No. 1, Canal No.2 and Cornelia Ida (in Region No. 3); at Herstelling, Lusignan, Mon Repos and Success (in Region No. 4); and Black Bush Polder, East Canje, No. 19 Village and Tain (in Region No.6) and elsewhere occurred on the same day, suggesting central coordination.
Former President David Granger expressed the opinion, during his weekly Public Interest Programme, that cultural violence was the exact contradiction of cultural cohesion. He noted that violence is aggravated by attitudes and policies which impair social solidarity and isolate, rather than integrate, communities.
“Cultural violence was evident in the wake of the grisly slaughter of two boys at Cotton Tree and the murder of another boy in September 2020 which plunged the villages deeper into violence. Cultural violence was evident, also, in the forceful removal of residents from informal settlements in Success and at Mocha-Arcadia and the public reactions to the killings of Orin Boston in Dartmouth and Quindon Bacchus at Mon Repos. These incidents, Mr. Granger said, were ominous indicators of the connection between cultural violence and social disintegration.
Mr. Granger said, further, that cultural violence was evident in the National Assembly when the Leader of the Opposition displayed a placard describing social cohesion as “a farce” during the President’s address in November 2017. This was the antecedent of the vulgarity evinced by prominent Opposition parliamentarians during the President’s presentation at the private meeting of the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association in September 2019 and the subsequent disorder in the National Assembly.
The former President lamented the awful legacies of ill will and loathing left by the cultural and criminal violence of the ‘Disturbances’ of the 1960s and the ‘Troubles’ of the 2000s. He indicated that the decisions to discard the Social Cohesion Action Plan and dismantle the Department of Social Cohesion have been big mistakes that effectively undermined the bases of the subsequent attempts to promote the ‘One Guyana Commission’ and ‘Corridor of Unity’ initiatives.
Society is becoming increasingly unbalanced. The sincere adoption of ‘social cohesion’ measures would be a sure means to avoid the recurrence of those dreadful events caused by cultural violence, Mr. Granger said.
