The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) is calling for more a consistent bail policy for persons accused of sexual offences. During the course of this year, it said, some 17 rape cases could not proceed in the High Court because the accused could not be found.
The association said the normal assurance advanced for bail, namely, that the accused will be available for trial, can clearly no longer be relied on. “This in itself should influence magistrates and judges (who grant bail on appeal from a magistrates’ decision) in a certain direction,” it said.
In a press release the association stated that the 17 accused were committed to stand trial after preliminary inquiries and the trials had to be postponed on several occasions and will probably have to be abandoned. “This state of affairs is an indictment on current approaches to bailing accused persons in rape and other serious sexual offences cases,” the release said.
According to the release, the accused, all men, accounted for half of a list of absconded accused published in the press by the Director of Public Prosecutions earlier this year. The notice sought the assistance of the public as to the whereabouts of these men. It was noted that instead of being a wake-up call for the more stringent application of rules governing bail, the fact that sexual offences cases in the High Court are grinding to a halt appears to have had the opposite effect. “Bail in such matters is now being granted more readily than ever, even when minors are involved,” the release said.
The GHRA pointed out that even without so many persons making a mockery of the bail system, “too many bail applications are ignoring the relationship of the accused to the victims. Interference (with victims and other family members), threats and offers to settle are rife.”
The association cited some bail approvals that it found beyond belief for example, where a West Coast Demerara magistrate granted bail to a 28-year old accused of raping a 13-year-old girl and to a 28-year-old man accused of raping a 12-year-old, despite objections from the police based on the problems they had locating him. Then there was a Corentyne magistrate who granted bail to three men allegedly involved in a gang rape of a 14-year-old and a Georgetown magistrate releasing an ex-policeman charged with raping two three-year-old baby girls on bail. Another city magistrate recently granted bail to a man charged with multiple sexual offences against young boys, while a New Amsterdam magistrate berated a Senior Probation Officer who had submitted a bail report in another case as “having a personal grudge” and being “too detailed”. The magistrate demanded that another report be prepared by another officer.
The association urged that magistrates be more consistent with respect to bail adding that in contrast to the examples cited earlier another magistrate uniformly refuses bail to every rape accused even when the police did not oppose it. “In exceptional cases this approach works unnecessary hardship on the accused. In keeping with proposed reforms of the Sexual Offences Act, there should be a presumption of no bail in any rape cases,” the release said.
The GHRA suggested that the presumption should be applied uniformly in charges of incest and previous knowledge or relationship between the accused and the victim – (over two-thirds of all sexual offences); carnal knowledge (sex with girls under 16 years of age) where the accused is more than three years older than the victim; serial rape of the victim; gang rape and where tampering with witnesses was a real possibility.
The GHRA feels that court procedures manifest a “definite bias and insensitivity against young female victims of sexual offences and a willingness to seize any opportunity to rigidly apply outdated rules and practices.”
It pointed out that earlier this year a magistrate jailed a 17-year-old victim who could not remember dates and other facts during her testimony, despite being advised she was a slow learner. It was only the intervention of a High Court judge that led to the girl’s release.
The GHRA also stated that juries tended not to believe young girls’ stories and some newspapers were not careful enough to hide identities of victims.
On the other hand, the rights of the accused are “assiduously guarded and those of victims routinely abused. These tendencies are being exaggerated now that a Legal Aid service is providing the accused in rape trials with defence counsel. The prosecution service in the meantime currently operates with less than half of the prosecutors required for an effective service, all of whom are young, recent graduates from law school. From a human rights point of view, the prosecution rather than the defence requires the services of legal aid lawyers, especially when the victims are minors,” the release said.
According to the release, underlying the failure of the judicial system to protect girl victims of sexual assault is a more generalized negative attitude to young people by the adult population. It stated that a significant and apparently growing segment of them have an attitude that young people who play noisily in the street, dress in ways they frown on and listen to awful music are juvenile offenders. “This attitude is reinforced, irrationally, when they see juveniles charged with murder and other violent crimes. While most of this negativity is directed at boys, girls are increasingly stigmatized in the same way. We are, to some extent, becoming a nation fearful of its young people.”
And combined with this ‘paedophobia’, the release said, the adult society also reflects elements of a culture described in a recent international study in which it was stated “today’s girls prefer to look sexy than be clever, undermining girls’ sense of worth in their most vulnerable, formative years and glorifying destructive behaviour… The overwhelming lesson teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being ‘sexy’ is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman’s life
