Earlier this week, it was reported that four men were freed of rape charges, three of whom were accused of raping children, because their accusers could not be located. According to the report, the state claimed that the complainants had “consistently failed to appear over the years”, that the police had been unable to find them at their last known addresses and that attempts to contact them via the media had also proved unfruitful. To say that this is perturbing is to put it very mildly, particularly when the time lapses between charges being laid and trial are taken into account.
The four men were charged between 2005 and 2011. In the earliest case, the accused Joel Damon allegedly raped a child repeatedly between 2003 and 2005. The age of the child was not given in the report, but according to the charge, the child was allegedly raped at least four times during that period. Given that 14 years have elapsed since the last alleged rape, the child in question, under the age of 16 at the time, unless she was a baby or toddler, would be an adult now.
Then there was the charge against Kenneth Skeete, who was accused of raping a 15-year-old girl in August 2006. The young woman in this case is now 28 years old.
The third man, Dhanraj Baldeo, also known as ‘Alvin,’ was charged with raping another man on March 15, 2010. In this case, 9 years have gone by since the accusation was made.
Finally, Ken Bess was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl on March 25, 2011. In this case, the complainant is now 20 years old.
In each of these cases, because the men were charged, it is logical to assume that the police investigated thoroughly, took statements and gathered other evidence that was available. The police do not bring charges based solely on allegations; they have to ensure that they have enough evidential material for a successful prosecution, or they are simply wasting time – theirs and the court’s.
One of the burning questions arising from the current state of affairs is why these cases took so long to be prosecuted, the backlog of cases awaiting trial in the high court, notwithstanding. It is a well-known fact that rape cases require careful handling, and their successful prosecution is hardly ever guaranteed, even when they appear to be open and shut. This is by no means an indictment on Guyanese prosecutors, one only has to a little research to realise that all but the most carefully built rape case can go awry in any country in the world. But Guyana’s problem is sloth, which inevitably leads to institutional injustice and the attempts to fix this are paltry when one considers the lives involved.
Rape can physically, mentally and emotionally damage its adult survivors, more so when they are children. All of the studies done, and the literature published point to the untold suffering of child survivors, often all their lives. Where it is available and affordable—and Guyana does not fall into either category—child survivors sometimes go through therapy into adulthood. Studies have proven that children rarely, if ever, lie about being sexually assaulted or raped. Furthermore, perhaps because of the human psyche, men, women and children are often embarrassed to admit that they were raped; rape still carries a stigma as well and humans fear exclusion.
Living through being raped is bad enough, having to wait years for justice for a crime perpetrated against you magnifies it more than a thousand times. In each of the cases mentioned above, the complainants’ lives would have had to have been placed on hold for them to attain justice given the lengthy periods between accusation and trial. One cannot blame them if they moved on with their lives and tried to put the horrible experiences behind them after all, 8, 9, 13 and 14 years respectively have gone by. On the flip side, if any of the men who were freed this week had been wrongfully accused and was waiting for his day in court to clear his name, then he also lost that opportunity.
The phrase, “justice delayed is justice denied”, attributed to 19th century British prime minister William E Gladstone might not have been originally made in reference to rape, but it certainly fits. Based on the report, we know with certainty that there are three young women and a young man, plus four formerly accused rapists somewhere out there who never got the justice they deserved.
