By Daizal Samad
FIRST Lady Sandra Granger has come out swinging against teenage pregnancies. Thank goodness! She is reported to have said: “This is where the Might and Majesty of the Law must come into play. Sexual intercourse with a child under sixteen is statutory rape and all loopholes must be closed. I do not want to hear any excuses…” This is as eloquent and as clear as can be.
Let us hope that our enforcement agencies, protection agencies, our courts, and our NGOs spring into action. And let us hope that this drives terror into those who have committed or want to commit the heinous act of rape, statutory or otherwise. There is an enormous body of work done on rape.
The work has been done elsewhere, of course. We here in Guyana have reduced the difficult work of research (and publication!) into a mere catchword. A mere empty utterance. The work done elsewhere proves beyond a doubt that most rapes are perpetrated by people close to us. Uncles, stepfathers, fathers, boyfriends, friends, neighbours, ‘child-fathers’, those that ought to be the most trustworthy.

“What people guh seh?”
Here in Guyana, as in other primitive societies, rapists are frequently shielded by family members. The rapists are safe behind a rotten cloak of shame. “What people guh seh?” More often than we think, the victims of rape are made to stay in the same houses as the rapists. The reminder is constant, the trauma continues and worsens, the fear consumes, and the rape happens again. In way too many instances, the child who is raped is then got rid of by what passes for marriage. Often ripped from school. Sold. And the conspiracy of deathly silence continues. The victims are further victimised by their new owners. Beatings and more rape continue for years on end, sometimes a whole lifetime.

Dumb Beast of Burden
Beaten down and bedraggled, without the right to say “No” or “No more”, the victims begin to accept evil as good, rape as marital duty. The whole world turns inside out and upside down. They become mere reproductive tools, mere instruments of sexual gratification; they cook and clean and scrub and lift and fetch. The human being turned into a dumb beast of burden. They begin to convince themselves that they were somehow responsible for the crime perpetrated on them.
They cannot run since there is nowhere to run and no one to run to. So they stay in situations where healing cannot occur. A kind of madness occurs. Many of these victims suffer from extreme forms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Even seasoned soldiers or war veterans do not recover easily, even with the help of the best psychologists. But even if we had real specialists in Guyana, how can our victims, especially the young ones, have access?
They would have to find some excuse to leave their prisons (which they learn to see as homes) to find help or relief. Escape takes money, and there is no money. It’s not as if these victims are hidden away. They hide in plain sight, their whole lives a lie. And their children’s lives are a mere pretence. They go out to weddings and funerals and religious functions, armed with false jollification or grief. They go to Parent-Teacher meetings. The sheer horror of it. And it begins in their homes, the whole horror show.

‘Many Dads, Very Few Fathers’
In Guyana the trend for the last decade or so is to have these conferences or workshops or seminars or some such fancy thing. The conference rooms are always well appointed, air-conditioned, table-clothed, lined chairs. We speak glibly about “parenting”, refusing to see that a sperm donor is not a father. Big George Foreman, former heavyweight champion of the world once said: “There are many dads out there, but very few fathers.” And while we talk at our conferences, victims stay in the only place they know, curled up in their soiled beds after cooking and feeding the beasts to whom they have been sold. So yes! “This is where the Might and Majesty of the Law must come into play!”