Dear Editor,
The exchange on rape and women’s dress has of late fallen into a thicket of non sequitur and irrelevance.
Stella Ramsaroop in her Saturday column grabbed the placard and quickly put on the ‘victim’ hood to then accuse this writer of stating that women lack analytical sophistication. She further compounds matters by exclaiming that this writer wishes to play the “blame the victim game” and was putting it about that raped ladies were themselves solely or partly responsible for their own violation.
Having read its unpropitious introduction I recognise that Ms Ramsaroop’s column would take us no closer to the truth than we have been all along.
My letter had said that “there is a lack of analytic sophistication in the discussion of social issues.” A certain category of person imagines every cry to be against him and every critic to be targeting his person. In Ms Ramsaroop’s case it has been made out to be collective. I am an enemy of the tribe or clique or species or however they define themselves. But in fact I made a generalisation that needed to be watered down or qualified. We Guyanese are in fact very good at discussing political and some social issues.
As to the point about the blame game, it is merely the repetition of a cliché that some categories of victim find useful. For some neither O J Simpson nor Michael Jackson could ever do wrong. For others Cheddi or Forbes were immaculate. And so on. So let us no further detain ourselves on this point.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
