A Culture of Rape

THE public’s outrage this week following revelations that a 12-year-old girl was raped by a family friend is understandable. What is incomprehensible, however, is just how minimal attention seems to be given to these reprehensible cases of rape in this country.

One would have thought that by now the authorities would have done much more than they actually say to arrest these dirty little secrets that have been festering in our midst for generations now. As it stands now, though, victims and their relatives are left in their hapless state, often at the risk of being raped and shamed all over again.

Just last week, advocacy group, Speak Out St. Lucia, issued a statement condemning the authorities’ lacklustre approach to dealing with rape, indicating that a more comprehensive national plan to deal with the situation.

Alarmingly, the group charged that rape and violence against women and children has been trivialized for quite some time now and that a clear message needed to be sent to those committing and/or enabling a culture of rape.

According to Speak Out St. Lucia, social services organizations are not being proactive and innovative enough to deal with the problem as far as coming up with a national plan that redirects society’s views on rape and violence.

The group also believes that some of society’s prominent players are often the perpetrators of rape and usually engage in witness tampering and other intimidating methods to silence victims. If true, that certainly undermines the course of justice, a hallmark cited in our national anthem.

As with everything else that affects us on a socio-economic level, a society cannot continue to tackle a perennial problem using the same one-dimensional approach and expect to reap any positive results. When criminals constantly hear how broken the justice system is, that only empowers them to act with impunity. Unfortunately, those who pay dearly for that anomaly are the victims who are also left broken.

Therefore, in light of the latest suffering of that 12-year-old who somehow mustered the courage to bring her plight to light, we renew our plea to the relevant authorities to do more than is either being said or done to bring some remedy to this virus of rape that has been allowed to fester into an epidemic over the years.

The time has long past for our newscasts to be stained by another case of rape with authorities still scrambling for excuses as to why a cure cannot be found. Whether through stiffer penalties or the setting up of the Sex Offender Registry, something decisive needs to be done to ameliorate the plight of women and children forced to live in shame through no fault of their own. If nothing tangible is being done to address this problem, then we are simply enabling a culture of rape.