Laws, social customs & appearance of justice must not confuse, shock and confound; there must be clarity

I ALWAYS thought and had the impression that self-defence was permitted legally and not punished with the same weight as the aggressor; when or if it reached the presence of the legal system. I was cautioned by elder friends in the police force as a young man that if you have an altercation with someone, do not enter the yard of the person- even if that someone assaulted a relative, whose honour you were representing, or you had some other justified reason because your right could become wrong. Because of trespassing onto a person’s domain, you have become an aggressor. Was all this wrong, illegal advice, or misinterpretations? I question this on the basis of what transpired recently at St Agnes Primary School. The details are on social media, thus, I need not elaborate here as the case is before the court. Does the old theory of self defence on domicile turf still protect the citizen? I am aware that in a physical altercation, a fistfight (outside of the Boxing Ring) where one fighter hits the other one and he collapses and dies, charges are brought against the fighter still standing. That happened in the 70s with Garth Azore. He punched another fighter and the man died and Garth was charged. I‘m certain he walked. There was another case where an aggressor was hit and he collapsed and was hospitalised. He had a heart problem but was always a threatening cantankerous character. The person who hit him had to go to the station every day for seven days before he was relieved of the potential burden of being charged for manslaughter.

Outside of those and others of the same scenario the incident at the school is special. What has to be taken into account is the existing custom of abandoning the legal system in preference for ‘honour vendetta measures’. I have had to coerce and physically force especially males under my guidance to use the neighbourhood police station, against the popular back then 2004-12 mantra of “Yuh got fuh deal wid dese banna”. But back then, there was a complete collapse of social order, and guns were easy to buy. Especially those with crimes attached, that perpetrators were eager to get rid of to eager wannabe’s. That period of intense badness and its habits are still in place, they have not vanished, only submerged. It still lingers and is fuelled by the presence of elements like narco pills, ecstasy and molly infiltrating the schools and a kind of’ it’s cool to be dumb’ attitude that I encountered recently at a school I had a public engagement at.

There was, or is, a female Sergeant at Albertown Station that I had a discussion with some years ago about the making casual and indifference of symbolic social incidents from the desk at the police station to the interpretations of the courts that should be managed towards serving and solving duel purposes. If the related sensibilities are active in those institutions, in relation to cultural customs, because of the potential for continued escalation, it can be intercepted. Human beings whether teachers, parents, personnel or Court luminaries are flawed, some even damaged. Customs and age-old cultural creeds helped to sustain those damages. One cannot help as a child but to hear close adult females whispering and males condemning the conclusions of the whisperings, about molestations and illicit encounters and spoil brat unprincipled behaviour that went unchecked, damaging both perpetrator and victim, allowed under the creed of “Yuh don’t hang yuh clothes pon lantern post”. Or a child that likes to hurt, mutilate and prey on animals and smaller children, that “He/she gon change, they gon grow out of it ”. They don’t.

Well, the age of the ‘Lantern’ post is gone, but its human damage is now added to the new afflictions of this age, we haven’t recomposed our management, so it’s becoming pervasive and the lantern post is now social media, ‘in yuh face.’ The defective personality is now the parent themselves, so what do we expect in the nurturing process? In defiance of stereotyping, we should conclude that latent propensities can manifest. I am aware that persons in the Ministry of Education and some social workers have tabulated from as early as 2008-11 or before, several developments of negative social impact on children. The hands-on response of the police has changed, but it has to adjust to where we are, for example, allowances extended to Deryck Kanhai- a businessman whose ilk for ‘reasons’ is rumoured to provide financial allowances to the police. Procedures backfired with that new custom of practice approach (prevalent in 2013) to a ‘Big Man’ and two policemen died, not with because of the procedure and appropriate gear.

In this case, they should have followed customary negotiating principles, why did they fail to recognise that they were dealing with a deranged and dangerous person? Simple, an adopted ‘social habit’ was applied. Another legal mystery is the sentencing of a man (deported from Canada) who walked into a Bank as an ISIS operative in 2016 demanding money, with a fake bomb threat, and from all the elements of the case seemed more a recipient of psychiatric treatment than the prisons. The laws in some African countries take into consideration Tribal, Islamic and British laws. They emerged from colonisation this way and we should at least cover, cultural, patriarchal and matriarchal considerations and awareness in the execution of our laws. Two young men were sentenced to prison for 23 years in 2018 and16 years in 2013 because they murdered other males who had sodomised them.

Culturally in Matriarchal culture, this is what was expected of them. It is a cultural antidote against a life shrouded in shame, that only that extreme action could cleanse. It was not the first time these killings occurred. I wrote about one I witnessed at Barr and James Streets in the 70s, and I know of others. These are not actions that are mourned or celebrated; it’s just how it is. Our legal system cannot function as an alien entity.
I must return, in closing, to the subject of our schools. During my daughter’s closing years at secondary school, she was with a classmate that got into an argument with a male student that resulted in him becoming the aggressor towards them. My daughter’s friend retaliated and subdued him; the matter went to the welfare teacher who told them that in the face of male aggression, they should have clambered up. I went to the school. I have always taught my children male and female that in a physical confrontation it is better to fight because you would get fewer blows rather than stand as a punching bag, hoping for an aggressor’s mercy. The then competent Headmistress intercepted. I never saw this misguided welfare teacher who was instructing young women to be trained to accept male verbal and physical assault. Because if they defend themselves they would be using current circumstances be charged and placed before the courts as number two accused whether you are defending yourself, in your home or workplace. That latter legal interpretation has frightening implications.

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