RAPE is not acceptable against any gender, nor is there any ridiculous arguments to justify it happening; though there is weird logic that I have heard from a person who I knew in the 70’s who was a serial rapist. He was shot by the police, after being in prison for as much as 15 rape charges. We called him ‘Sexy’ and he did not present a grotesque and fearsome visage, there is no stereotypical look for what a rapist, he or she looks like.

The logic that sexy presented was that if he likes a young lady he consummates the relationship, because all the courtship [hustling] was too labour some, he actually believed this because after each act he would buy chocolates and a card and visit his victim, that is how he was arrested. Each time, definitely had our country evolved to enlightenment there would have been a institution for the criminal insane rather than have the police murder him to solve what was a complex matter, that our health system would have learnt about.

There was another Kitty resident that would not say anything to women he claimed to fall in love with, but would break and enter their home and rape that person; I was told that his last victim was a policewoman. These are bizarre mental developments that justify in each situation an offensive predator nature. But the epitome of rape that is stigmatised receives no sympathy, and has radical cultural stages to reverse that incident by far transcended by our era of legal and moral precepts. That category is the rape of male by male.

I write from the Afro-Guyanese experience, I am unsure if this is the innate same across our peoples. If a young man is attempted to be assaulted, or assaulted by what is termed a Bu-man, it goes like this “bway ah hear something happen to yuh de other night, yuh know wuh yuh got fuh do, fuh raise yuh head high, yuh got fuh kill yuh man, unless duh’s wuh yuh is.” This is preached in every grass root area with more explicit language as a dictate without recourse, a straight forward one option.

Back in the mid seventies, a said youngster [name withheld] came out of prison and hung out with other young men, some with jobs, some without, but all with ambitions beyond the James and Bar Street corner they met on and off in the afternoons. An older seasoned criminal came out of prison his name was ‘Bull’, he started to conduct a process called ‘layin-impression’, he was targeting the ‘said youngster’ implying through his actions that the ‘said youngster’ was his female [other terms used] in prison.

Others of Bull’s seniority who were incarcerated with him confirmed that it was not so. It happened one afternoon that the ‘said youngster’ came at him with a cutlass and opened his face from the widow peak down, this fatal wound would have taken the enormous strength of an older and stronger male to inflict, this was no ordinary rage exhibited that afternoon at the shop we knew as Allison’s shop. The youth was arrested, two policemen argued in low tones why the youth shouldn’t be charged.

But he was, and served a sentence below eight years for the act. In 2018 I read the story of Christopher Stanley, a Tiger Bay resident who after smoking marijuana in 2015, exhibited strange behaviour and had stabbed and killed another resident. In court, he said that the person, another male that he killed, had tried to rape him. How could any judge viewing such perplexed and disturbing evidence just sentence him to prison for 23 years [the sentence defied logic] without recommending visits to the counselling section of the GPH. Both Justice Sandi Kissoon and his (the accused) counsel, Max McKay, failed to understand the underlying elements of the defence that this young man presented.

What is accepted in one culture is abhorred in another, and because we have several cultural layers within groups and of separate groups, we need to expand our collective awareness to judge with a cultural insight of the diverse currents of understanding of that which pervades our social realms. A young woman who is raped is a victim, based on her innocence [meaning she was not in defiance of previous warnings about people, places and substances etc.] she will be condignly revenged by male relatives.

For the male he has one chance, one path to redemption among his peers, to grievously wound or slay the predator that has violated all that he aesthetically is his claim to ‘manhood’. Rape, especially of children by adults, is unforgiveable; seduction of young teenage girls by older men is offensive and punishable. Age of consent relationships regardless of comparisons is nobody’s business. Many young men tell stories as grown men of been seduced by one of mom’s friends, this is one category of rape guarded by its victims as a memorable adventure. But ask anyone in urban Georgetown of male on male rape and they will tell you that unbridled violence is expected or a life of disrespect. This, our lawmakers must understand, the 2015 case mentioned was not the first.