Opinion
A Child on a Van, With No One to Turn To
A 44-year-old man has been jailed for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl on a passenger van. He was not the driver or the conductor. He was a stranger in the next seat, and nothing in our public transport system stood between him and the child.
Kingstown · 29 July 2026
For more than a decade I have argued that Saint Vincent and the Grenadines needs a public transport system that the state manages and is accountable for. The conviction of Demond Grant is the latest reason why.
Grant, 44, was jailed last week after a jury found him guilty of indecently assaulting a 13-year-old girl and exposing himself to her on a van travelling the leeward route in June 2024. High Court judge Justice Rickie Burnett handed down the sentence, and noted, among other things, that Grant was 31 years his victim’s senior.
Let me be clear about what this case is, and what it is not. Grant was not the driver of the van. He was not a conductor. He was another passenger, a grown man who sat down beside a child and assaulted her as the vehicle moved between communities on the leeward side of the island. No amount of driver vetting would have screened him out, because he was simply a fare-paying passenger like any other.
That is precisely the point. When a child boards a van in this country, she boards a small private business with almost no safety architecture around her. There are no cameras recording the cabin. There is no conductor trained or required to intervene. There is no posted code of conduct, no number to call, no operator who answers for what happens on board. The driver’s task is to move bodies and collect fares. A child being assaulted in the back seat has, in practice, no one to turn to.
The court heard that this child, realising what was happening, placed her bag between herself and the man beside her and waited until the van reached a point where she could get off and reach her sister. Consider that. Her only available defence was a bag on her lap and the hope of the next stop. That is the level of protection our system currently offers the young people who depend on it every single day.
Her only available defence was a bag on her lap and the hope of the next stop.
I am not naive about what public management can and cannot do. Bringing the fleet under state control would not, by itself, place a guardian in every vehicle. Fellow passengers will always be fellow passengers. A state-run system carries its own risks of cost, inefficiency, and political interference. Those are fair objections, and I do not brush them aside.
But the value of a managed, properly regulated system is not that it makes every rider a saint. It is that it builds accountability and protection into the environment children are forced to travel in. It is the difference between a network where standards can be set and enforced and one where they cannot.
What real oversight would look like
- Cameras in every public-service vehicle, for deterrence and for evidence.
- A trained, licensed conductor or attendant on routes that carry schoolchildren.
- A posted passenger code of conduct and a complaints line that is actually answered.
- Clear, enforceable safety duties on operators, with penalties for those who ignore them.
- Specific protections for children and other vulnerable passengers travelling alone.
Some of this could be pursued through regulation without full state ownership, and I would welcome any government that took even those steps. But the reason I keep returning to public management is that regulation without an accountable public operator has, for decades, meant rules on paper and nothing on the road. Someone has to own the safety of the system. Right now, no one does.
Our vans carry schoolchildren to and from class, workers to and from town, elderly citizens to and from the clinic. For most Vincentians they are the only way to move. A service that essential cannot be left as a loose federation of private operators answerable to no one for the safety of the people in their vehicles.
A 13-year-old girl did everything right. She recognised what was happening, she tried to protect herself, she told her sister, she told her mother, and her family went to the police. The system around her did none of its part, because there was no system, only a van, a driver watching the road, and a predator with an empty seat beside him. She deserved better. So does every child who will board a van tomorrow morning. We have talked about this for long enough. It is time to build the thing that should have been protecting her.
Lance Davis is the editor and publisher of Vincypowa News.