Dear Editor,
I presented a letter to the Stabroek editor on June 26 dealing with the subject of the editorial published on June 28. My letter was published on June 29 under the caption, ‘This society has gone on an anti-male crusade.’ The editorial justified the sentencing of a father to jail for beating his delinquent daughter who had left one afternoon and returned the next day. This is a fourteen-year-old child, and I reiterate that he did the right thing, and that the Magistrate was insensitive. The writer of the editorial is obviously not a father, nor does the writer even reflect on the fact that this man has in his care two other daughters younger than this one. Nowhere in the editorial are they even considered, so I am to assume that the writer is also not a parent. So hurrah for the pen of the Stabroek editorial. Subsequent to that the Magistrate sentenced another young man to six weeks in jail for threatening his ex. What erroneous hogwash will constitute the next editorial to justify that?
History has taught us that only a proper stream of agreed principles addressing any social phenomenon can serve it with justice. Self-righteous causes on all continents have led to aberrations. That same mood of self-righteous detachment from the reality is growing out of proportion in Guyana as it relates to domestic abuse.
I, like many other men have crossed the line in school and at home and have received the six lashes of the ‘wild cane’ or the broad belt at home. I denounce the pseudo-psychology based on speculation that the child was unloved at home or she is in the shadow of Cinderella’s stepmother, because no evidence has informed us of that. A father cannot bond with her as a mother now that she has physically arrived and has discovered and is exploiting the newly found attention of puberty. It’s just that, for the same reason most schoolboys get their hearts broken by older teenage boys, a young female child has to be protected from herself; twist it or turn it they are prey, and fathers seldom compromise the way some mothers I have known have done. Like 90% of the men in Guyana I have had my allotment of relationships over the years; I have lied, they lied, I caught and got caught. But I have never beaten a woman or assaulted a woman with any instrument, though growing up I was whipped at school and at home. Children have to be coaxed, delicately reasoned with, and when they proceed to test you, punished and whipped.
The private obsessions of those in authority must not be let loose on society under the guise of causes as in the case of the editorial, which concluded in reference to my letter: “In both of her rulings, Magistrate Octive-Hamilton dispensed justice tempered with mercy, as well as a means by which both the defendants and the complainants could learn from their errors and move forward.” Easy to write with the indifference of the self-righteous, removed from the daily struggles of an underprivileged family. But from the letters of Leon O Rockcliffe of June 30, and Neil Adams of July 2, both in Stabroek News, I am not the only citizen observing the temperament of the courts in response to the frequent outbursts of domestic murders, and if you pay attention we have an epidemic of murders. Yet, what mental process can justify a criminal record as in the case of this father, to be described as “justice tempered with mercy?” Who is extending mercy to his three daughters now, without the shepherd; surely the door is unguarded and it‘s happy hour for the comforting wily wolf/ves.
Yours faithfully,
Barrington Braithwaite
Editor’s note
The writer of the editorial did not see Mr Braithwaite’s letter before it was published.
