WMC Women Under Siege

The Bahamas Faces a Crisis of Underaged Victims of Sexual Assault and Predatory Behavior

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In January of this year, two Bahamian police officers marshaled 35-year-old Latario Clarke into a courtroom for his arraignment. He was charged with raping six underaged girls, with all offenses taking place during the pandemic between May 2020 and January 2021. In one instance, Clarke allegedly picked up a 14-year-old from a Super Value grocery store in Nassau before driving to another location to commit the offense — for this, he received an additional kidnapping charge.

In August 2020, Clarke had been freed on $5,000 bail after he was accused of “procuring a 13-year-old girl to have sex.”

Most of Clarke’s assaults were arranged on Facebook, where he chatted with girls before suggesting a meeting in person.

Bahamian activists say that sexual abuse of teenage girls, and reports of underaged girls missing for days on end, is common to the point of widespread dismissal by the public, and this phenomenon is worsening in the pandemic. Reports of missing teenagers are pushed through an accelerated life cycle of virality in which widespread outrage and concern are quickly replaced by skepticism, then retirement — all in a matter of days.

“Missing girls is its own pandemic,” said Alicia Wallace, director of Equality Bahamas, an organization that advocates for broader rights for women. “Every couple of weeks, you can expect to see a flyer circulating with a picture of a girl anywhere from 12 to 17 years old. The general attitude of the public is that these girls are bad — why bother us with this?”

Wallace claims the dismissal of these stories stems from the expectation that a missing girl will show up at home in a few days, safe and in perfect health. The possibility that a girl may have been coerced into having sex with a man twice her age is not an immediate concern to some, Wallace said, as most do not consider the possibility of unconsensual sex, instead assuming that the girl participated willingly. Wallace said part of her work as an activist and a columnist for Bahamian newspapers involves teaching the public that underaged girls are not legally or socially mature enough to give consent.

“When a young girl is harassed, raped, or a victim of any sort of violence, the first impulse is to blame the girl,” said Allaya Hagigal, an activist who works for the National Security Ministry on women’s safety issues.

According to Commissioner of the Bahamian Police Paul Rolle, more than 100 people in the Bahamas went missing in 2020. “Notwithstanding,” said Rolle, “the majority of missing person reports were adolescent females engaging in sexual intercourse,” a phrase Wallace saw as a dangerous euphemism for rape.

Rolle also noted a 34-percent increase in sexual offenses in the country in 2020 compared to 2019, a surge that the Bahamas Crisis Center, an organization that provides assistance to women in abusive situations, seems to corroborate. “We’ve certainly seen more referrals with sexual assault and intimate partner violence last year,” Sandra Dean Patterson, the Center’s director, said in a press conference. “But, in particular, children and teenagers we saw a great increase in.”

The commissioner warned that a new trend had emerged during the pandemic of sexual assaults occurring at AirBnB vacation rentals, where young girls were being lured by men on social media. Activists claim that this trend is part of a larger culture of predatory behavior toward teenage girls and, perhaps, a symptom of poverty.

Economic crises and surges in gender violence appear in parallel, with loss of finances and employment predicting sexual and physical assaults against women. And, as Patterson told the press, historically, there have been twice as many children under the age of 16 — the legal age of consent in the Bahamas — who have been sexually assaulted than women victims, according to formal reports.

This year, as the pandemic crashed the tourism sector — the primary source of income in the Bahamas — to near-complete stagnation, the unemployment rate surged to 30 percent. Additionally, many of these workers in the tourism industry have been unable to receive assistance from the government because they are informal workers. Thus, the pandemic has plunged tens of thousands of Bahamian families into poverty.

“Predators can go to certain schools, look around, and see who looks like they don’t have everything they need,” Wallace said.

The inability to afford luxuries, or even some necessities, is in this way a chink in the armor, allowing an older man to establish himself as a figure in the girl’s life until she turns 16 (the age of consent in the Bahamas) — by then groomed to become a sexual conquest.

“A lot of the girls who go missing are 16 on the nose, and that’s not an accident,” said Wallace. “These men are taking time to groom them till they turn 16 so they won’t be charged with statutory rape. For the 16-year-old girl, she might be thinking, for the past year and a half, ‘This man has been giving me lunch money.’”

But sometimes, as in the story of the 14-year-old girl picked up at the grocery store, waiting is not deemed a necessary precaution.

A 2015 report by the Ministry of Social Services found that the Bahamas had the highest recorded rape rate in the Caribbean. And a 2019 survey by the Ministry of Health concluded that more than one in 10 Bahamians had experienced a “nonconsensual sex act,” leading some to refer to rape in the Bahamas as an “epidemic.” Still, said Wallace, “sexual assault and sexual violence are still treated as something that happens to other people.”

The spike in missing girls this year — the constant carousel of adolescent faces on posters — has prompted a more evolved discussion of sexual assault in Bahamian internet circles. But while men seem more open to hearing survivors’ stories than ever before, that interest is quickly cut short as soon as one of their friends is implicated as a perpetrator of sexual assault, both Wallace and Hagigal said.

“We started naming their friends, and they immediately switched their attitude and said we were making it up,” Wallace said. “There’s a lot of victim blaming, a lot of victim shaming.”

Paul Rolle, Commissioner of the Bahamian Police, suggested the solution to the surge in missing girls was in the hands of the parents, who must diligently monitor their daughters’ contacts and locations. He proposed creating a sex offender registry, though most perpetrators do not have a prior sex-crime charge.

On April 1, a prominent Nassau preacher, Apostle Julian Johnson, accused Police Commissioner Rolle of “sexually assaulting many young women” in the police force, issuing a warning that Rolle would soon be brought to court. Rolle denied the allegations and turned Johnson’s “spurious allegations” over to the Criminal Investigation Department for investigation.

Police officers and several politicians were also accused last year of purposefully ignoring the years-long cycle of abuse of teenage girls by fashion designer Peter Nygard, who used the Bahamas as his playground to host “pamper parties” before his arrest in Canada last year.

Earlier this month, Bahamian Chief Justice Sir Brian Moree said “serious consideration” was being given to the idea of creating a separate sex-crimes court, a specialty court that would take into consideration the possible emotional trauma inflicted on the victim. Among other measures, defendants and victims would never be in the same room during trial proceedings, an encouraging sign that victims of sex crimes will be taken seriously and treated with care.

The introduction of such a court could not come too soon, as cases are projected to climb. The idea was first floated in 2019, when then-Acting Chief Justice Vera Watkins said its establishment would be a “tremendous benefit” to victims. The number of reported sexual offenses was considerably lower then, compared to the succeeding year, and if the current trend holds, there will be more victims — particularly underaged girls — this year.



More articles by Category: Gender-based violence, Girls, International, Violence against women
More articles by Tag: Caribbean, Bahamas, Sexualized violence, Sexual assault
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