FOR my birthday two weeks ago, I went to watch the much-hyped remake of the film It, based on the Stephen King book about a demonic clown that haunts a small American town called Derry.
It was the most entertaining cinematic experience I’ve had in a very long time, a gory mixture of manic horror and dark comedy. The basic premise of the film is that in this small town, within a specific cycle, horrible things happen to children in particular, while the town just keeps on moving along as if everything is normal.
Each of the child characters in the movie, even the antagonists, are all seen to be suffering from the consequences of decisions or actions taken by adults. If I were to undertake a critical review of It, I would explore the similarity between the title of the film and the word ‘id’, in that the titular It was really representative of the communal id of the adults of Derry, their disconnection from and their abuse and manipulation of their children, and the communal complicity that normalised their behaviour.

It, the garish, psychopathic clown of the movie, was created in essence by the citizens of the community he terrorised, and so was the primary suspect in the rape and murder of Leonard Archibald. Let me say, before I go on further, that as a person who comments and seeks to cultivate discussion on social media, for days I’ve refrained from commenting on this horrendous crime. I’m the father of a 13-year-old. I don’t believe in the death penalty as a deterrent to crime and I don’t understand the moral mechanism that sees it as justice. It’s a hard position to take, particularly in the face of atrocity. When I consider the circumstances during which Leonard’s life was brutally just discarded, literally like garbage, my worst instincts are ignited and my entire philosophy of the concepts of law and order all but crumble away. I therefore had to take pause before putting forward a primal and instinctive position that would have been at odds with my personal, carefully crafted position on this.

When the initial details of the crime came out, my initial reaction was a mixture of horror and anger. When the circumstances in which the crime was allowed to happen came out, the horror gave way to shame and dread. One particularly harrowing account came from a young villager, now 20, who related to the Guyana Chronicle an incident in which he, eight years ago, was knocked out by the primary suspect, sexually abused and left tied to a tree for days, his only hope coming when the branch to which he was lashed broke. Despite being hospitalised and a police report being made, the suspect was never charged, ostensibly because the young victim’s parents – in his words – might possibly have taken ‘compensation’ from the accused to not pursue the case.
To any of us aware of the grim, murky, sordid situation with regard to sexual abuse, particularly of young people, in Guyana, this is not a new story. A close and much beloved friend confided in me a few years ago about her being raped by someone who was entrusted to give her a ride home. She spoke about relating the incident to her dance teacher, who had been the one to suggest that the rapist, the teacher’s relative, drop her, but who when told of the incident blurted out, “Not this again,” clearly aware that her relative had a history of sexual assault.

My friend told me of the multiple reports and the mockery she had to face at various police stations, and how she had to arrange transportation to take the police to her assailant’s home. Nothing ever came out of the case and the man still walks free. This is not an isolated story. It’s a familiar narrative, an assault taking place, a frustrating process of making a report to the police, lacklustre investigations or none at all, and then the case being forgotten. There is no area of Guyana that has been immune from this phenomenon, which means that it is a systemic problem.

Two days ago, I received a message from several friends to sign an online petition for justice for Leonard Archibald. I did not, for several reasons, but the most prominent one being that the person who wrote the petition made the curious claim that this was an issue of the inadequacy of the rural justice system. This showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the extent of the problem.
Sexual abuse in Guyana has always been aligned with institutional power, whether it is seen as a core benefit of power or whether hegemonic power has been used to systematically cover up sexual abuse. And as with every aspect of the abuse of power, whether corruption or sexual assault or interpersonal violence, there is always a strong element of communal complicity in it.

No institution that I know of is without stain. Not the public sector, not the church (and by this I include the mosque and the mandir), and not the police force itself. Stories abound about senior ranks ‘bullying,’ the preferred euphemism for rape, young recruits, both male and female. The association between rape and power is not a new one. In Guyana however, where both formal and informal power structures are either dysfunctional and hegemonic, sexual assault is a phenomenon that festers easily, simply because the power that feels it can rape with impunity is also always the power that suppresses dissent and thwarts justice.

Leonard Archibald was a victim of this dynamic. On the one hand, the formal system that was meant to protect young people like Leonard failed multiple young people in that the primary suspect had a pattern of behaviour that local law enforcement, indistinct from national law enforcement, was aware of. There is a picture on Facebook that sums up this indecent situation: the suspect in a house standing next to a young child (whose face is thankfully obscured) wearing a police hat on his head. With the failure of the formal systems, the failure of the informal ones naturally develop. In what seems a poor neighbourhood, the parents of the young victims, met with official inaction whenever an assault is reported, seem to have fallen into a pattern of impotence and then complicity. The resident molester attacks a child, a report is made, a deliberately ineffective police response is undertaken, a settlement is proposed and accepted, and the cycle continues. If there was ever a[nother] cause for a Commission of Inquiry into the Guyana Police Force, this would be it.

The rape played a part, as well as the drowning, but it was this communal complicity that murdered Leonard Archibald. And this is something not simply the community in which the young man lived was responsible, but in many ways the entire country. To the degree that we do not take a stand and truly ensure that national mechanisms that are geared to protect the vulnerable from the powerful, particularly with regard to sexual offences are enabled, we are all complicit. We will have a spate of outrage as we did for other young victims. A few years ago, it was Neesha Gopaul and complaints about how the system had failed her; today, it is about Leonard Archibald and complaints about how the same system failed him. At what point do we seek to fundamentally change the system? There is the saying, it takes a village to raise a child–the same can be said perhaps for monsters, and we seem to be doing a fine job at cultivating them.