Addressing Sexual Violence

Jul 01, 2012 Editorial

The unanimous passing of the Sexual Offences Bill 2009 (SOB 2009) back in 2010 does not appear to have done much to nip the astounding number of sexual assaults committed in Guyana.
The national psyche has been bombarded with such a seemingly unending stream of sexual abuse and violence over the last few years in the media that the citizen who remarks that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in the absence of any definitive study, might be forgiven.
The overwhelming majority of such offences, after all, never see the light of day. We have had reports of men raping their stepdaughters, men raping their own daughters and even their sons, men raping toddlers, men raping random women and, of course, men raping their wives. In all the permutations and combinations however, the male perpetrator is the constant. The female is almost always the victim.
What we are confronted with therefore, is primarily violence used by men to satisfy their sexual libido. This is not a new situation but the difference is that for most of our history it was seen as normal for men to be “aggressive” in their “pursuit” of the sexual “conquest” of women.
The identification with the hunting of animals to satisfy the pangs of hunger was not coincidental. Those men that did not live up to this standard were considered unmanly and effete.
The story of civilisation might be seen as a millennia-long struggle to control our physical drives so as to respect the rights of others who were not to be considered mere objects for their satisfaction. Freud discussed this in his “Civilisation and its Discontents”.
It is obvious that in Guyana something is fundamentally flawed with our system of keeping male sexual libidos under control. The passage of SOB2009 was a step in the right direction. It brought together and updated all our legislation of sexual offences in one place so that it should have become easier for those entrusted with upholding our laws to at least know what that law is.
Take for instance, the crime of rape. Until then, the crime evidently could only be committed on a female, ignoring the fact that some males have also been victims of this act of violence. Then there is the problem of husbands forcing wives to have sex without the latter’s consent. At long last women can now be treated as human subjects with rights over their own bodies.
From all of the foregoing, it should be clear that SOB2009, like all laws that impinge on the behaviour of citizens, is heavily intertwined with the issue of our societal morality. In such matters, we have discovered over the years that states, through their arms of Law and Order (the courts and the police) are never enough to guarantee success.
This will especially be true of such a fundamental drive as sex. After the initial meeting of the National Task Force for the Prevention of Sexual Violence to assist in the implementation of the new provisions, there has not been much evidence of its work. But we believe that the wider society and its organs must play its (equal, if not greater) part.
We are talking about a new paradigm as to how the male should view his relations with others –especially females – in his quest for sexual satisfaction. The old paradigm, articulated either implicitly or explicitly in some religious texts that the role of the woman is to “satisfy” the needs of the male will just have to go.
This might present a challenge to those that take a literal interpretation of these texts as the authority for their actions and we hope that such objections will be articulated and addressed openly in the coming months.
We all need to be reading from the same page on the question of sexual offences. The religious bodies not only have to accept SOB2009; they will have to become its most vigorous advocates since it is their teachings that form the foundation of most moralities.

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Addressing Sexual Violence

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