“But, in particular, children and teenagers we saw a great increase in.” “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. 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. “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. “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.Īccording to Commissioner of the Bahamian Police Paul Rolle, more than 100 people in the Bahamas went missing in 2020. 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. 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 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 general attitude of the public is that these girls are bad - why bother us with this?” “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. “Missing girls is its own pandemic,” said Alicia Wallace, director of Equality Bahamas, an organization that advocates for broader rights for women. 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. Most of Clarke’s assaults were arranged on Facebook, where he chatted with girls before suggesting a meeting in person.īahamian 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. 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.” 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. He was charged with raping six underaged girls, with all offenses taking place during the pandemic between May 2020 and January 2021. In January of this year, two Bahamian police officers marshaled 35-year-old Latario Clarke into a courtroom for his arraignment. Violence against women The Bahamas Faces a Crisis of Underaged Victims of Sexual Assault and Predatory Behavior (Creative Commons)
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