Call out the pedophiles within, too, Mr. Prime Minister

The denizens of Facebook will have read about the incident now plaguing Cornell University and staining its Ivy League reputation.

No, not allegations of plagiarism like those that drove Jason Arday, the former professor at the University of Cambridge, to suicide. Rather, Cornell is being dragged, as they say on social media, for a sexual abuse scandal.

According to media claims, seven members of a fraternity were involved in abusing a young woman who had been incapacitated by a drug, ketamine, that had been forced on her. Adding insult to that already grave injury was the allegation that these young men put out the word in their fraternity’s group chat that “free p---y” was on offer upstairs.

No one among this group of privileged university students called the police. Nobody stopped the assault.  No criminal charges were laid after the woman reported the matter, either.  But public pressure recently has forced New York State prosecutors to reopen investigations into the incident. 

Although two students reportedly were expelled, the university is being pilloried for “disciplining ” the others by requiring them to write a self-reflective essay.  

Meanwhile, the “Maleficent Seven” (as I’ve dubbed them) have had their names and faces plastered across social media, with the stated intention of blighting their reputations and scuttling the professional careers they were expected to walk into. 

This incident has brought up awful memories of a similar incident at my university.  It involved members of a sports team and a girl who used to frequent the newsroom in which I worked. Observation alone – never mind a conversation – would have shown that the girl was fragile, vulnerable, not-quite-there. 

So, when I learned she had been the victim of spiked drinks and then non-consensual fellatio, my outrage knew no bounds. And as Short Shirt described it, I felt like I wanted “to scream, and scream, and screeeeeeeam.”

In this instance, criminal charges were laid.  But not one of the men was convicted. And some people breathed a sigh of relief that the future of these up-and-coming boys would not be ruined – especially by some immigrant from Jamaica.  But you know what?  St. John’s, then the largest Catholic university in America, expelled them all, anyway, for their dishonourable behaviour. They were not of the character the institution was building, you see.

I’m recounting all this because, right now, in Antigua and Barbuda, I’m deeply pained to witness sexual abuse being used as a political football; so my essay is intended not as a penance – but as an accusation.

I don’t know if he’s using it as a convenient distraction from his personal problems; a diversion from our economic and other challenges; or a vicious whip to castigate a political opponent.  But whatever it is, I find the prime minister’s performative outrage on pedophilia distasteful.

Pedophilia in our society is neither new nor sudden.  It is not restricted to socio-economic class, nor religion, nor race. And the Lord knows – unlike those who pretend otherwise – that it is deeply rooted in politics, with a long tradition of same in the prime minister’s party.

In fact, a member of that party once shared with me a statement a senior government minister had made about sex with young girls: “It’s like eating veal,” he said. And in response to POWA’s protest that another MP should not be in a relationship with a schoolgirl, I, myself, was told, quite defiantly, “Once dem 16, they’re fair game.  I’m not breaking any law!”  I guess he was helping her to iron her uniform or with her SBAs… .

So, when juxtaposed with these known facts, the current moral posturing rings rather hollow.  Where was the outrage hiding before?  I didn’t hear it in Parliament, years ago, when another senior minister recounted how he’d left an underdeveloped little girl – in his own words, “looking like figure 11” – in a dark area on Redcliffe Street with a big man who told him, “Boss, ah me a control dat!”  (It’s in the Hansard.)

Or is this brand-new soapbox simply a case of “teef hate fuh see next teef wid long bag?”

I believe most adults would love to see pedophiles taken off the streets and lost in jail or confined to a psychiatric ward. But the truth is, not all would – especially those parents, pimps, and madams who are living well off young flesh.

How many times has activist Mary John volunteered information, in vain, about the little girls who ever so often go “missing” and then turn up hale and hearty days after? How many of those who harbour them, statutory-rape them, film them, sell them, and buy them have been arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, jailed?

And when the envelope is pushed once in a while and some big, hard-stone man is caught, don’t the charges just somehow disappear?  Excuses about the girl “looking older,” or having claimed she was 16, are proffered; and the accused, belly stuffed with “veal,” goes home to his children who are the age-mates of his victims.

Then there are the police officers, themselves.  One didn’t even have the delusion of age to offer, because the child was still in primary school; and this was a cop I used to see – sitting pious as Pontius – all through my ordeal in the Magistrates Court.

Whah these people go tell God, eh?

It was only a few weeks ago that a report was published, attributing most of the Nation’s teenage pregnancies to grown men!!  How is it that, with mandatory reporting by the hospital, these adult males are not already chooking and digging in 1735?  Who raped a months-old baby the other day, and why is his identity being as fiercely guarded as Yida Zhang’s shooter?

Look! I could go on, recounting incidents and even pointing fingers, but to what end?  Real outrage resides only with the few. Protecting the “respectability” of the rich, the connected, the privileged is way more important to this Christian society than preserving the sanctity of childhood.

And for all the mealy-mouthed hypocrites who are quick to blame the girls for being too womanish and too force-ripe, ask those sick men why they’re so inclined to funk the fruit when there are so many mature ones on the branch.  And ask the “decent” men who know about their friends’ particular perversion why they continue to drink with them, play golf and dominoes with them, go fishing with them… .

As I said before, the prime minister’s suddenly sprouted outrage at pedophiles lacks authenticity.  It is years – decades – too late for credibility.  And while the message is, indeed, one that all should hear and heed, he simply is not a messenger we can believe.