Orville Taylor | Protection from sex offenders

Monkey money! Nothing can replace the dignity a person loses from being violated by a monster of a human, who has no regard for the sanctity of another person’s body. It took me a day to go to the story after it broke last week. A female security guard, posted at a perilous location, was raped while at work.

A sum of $10 million was awarded by the courts to the victim. In real terms, this is probably close to the annual salary of the person, who made the policy decision that led to somebody’s daughter being exposed to a most heinous crime.

Assuming that there are juridical guidelines which allowed for the court to hand down such a sentence, the pain and suffering is lifelong. However, the money is paltry in spite of how much it looks like.

Perhaps the worst four letter word in the English vocabulary, rape is a horrific and perhaps unpardonable sin. If one has ever sat with a person who had undergone such a traumatic experience, there is absolutely no way in which one could even feel comfortable sitting in a room with an animal-instinct driven human, who committed such a crime.

It is such an awful experience that one of the ways of coping, is for victims to blank out that chunk of memory, so that they do not have to relive it every day. Interestingly, persons who may have witnessed it or were in a position to know about it, and were incapable of doing anything to stop it, also undergo that trauma and they themselves block it out or experience post-traumatic stress disorder pretty much for the rest of their lives.

Rape does not only affect the immediate victim, but can have spin-off effects on their partners, relatives, friend and others, including co-workers.

Males generally cannot empathise, except in cases where another male commits an act of buggery. Jamaican law does not define rape as something a man can experience. However, just imagine what it feels like to have a pungent smelling woman, aesthetically unpleasant in every way, holding on to you, perhaps with help and putting all parts of her body in your face and even your genitalia, and you are unable to do anything about it. Multiply that feeling about 10 times.

The question of the liability of the employer does not even arise. At common law, an employer has an obligation at all times, to provide a safe and secure environment within which workers should work. Safe generally means free from environmental and non-human hazards, while security speak to human threats. Whatever the circumstances, there can be no condition under which a worker be forced to carry out his or her duty on the conditions which in danger his or her life. Where those conditions exist and the employer refuses to re-mediate the situation, it is a breach of contract and tantamount to a constructive dismissal.

If these facts are established, this could easily be an unjustifiable dismissal within the remit of our Industrial Disputes Tribunal (IDT). Employers’ obligations and the corresponding workers’ rights are built into our Labour Relations Code of 1976. All elements of the Code are relevant before the IDT and are very persuasive before review courts.

While I am puzzled that this was not the first time the employer committed this breach and the penalty being so mild, there is another general lesson to be learned.

Employers are liable for the conduct of their workers especially where they infringed on the rights of others. Our recently enacted Sexual Harassment Act established a Sexual Harassment Tribunal (SHT). If consulted before it was set up, I certainly would not like the acronym especially if ‘I’ sit in the middle of one of its hearings.

Our IDT actually had the capability to handle sexual harassment matters, because they fall within the general scope of breaching a worker’s right to a secure workplace. Nevertheless, the Act makes some important changes, because it also circumscribes the behaviour of the offender to a third unconnected party. Thus, for example, if a worker made sexual advances or engaged in behaviour of a sexual content, it can be irrelevant if the object of the action is tolerant or even complicit. A third person, who goes to work, should not be exposed to debauchery.

Even innocent behaviour, involving mischievous, consensual horseplay, can land a worker or manager squarely in the category of ‘sex offender’, wearing the scarlet letter for life, and lumped into the monolithic classification of ‘nasty men’.

The status of sex offences has puzzled me for quite a while though. Is there something inherently different about sex offenders, as compared to robbers, murderers, drug-dealers and other perpetrators of major crimes? Are recidivism rates for ‘perverts’ higher than for ‘hardened’ criminals? Neither lawyers nor legislators have answered this question.

We might not say it explicitly in our legislation, but certainly our jurisprudence seems to suggest that our lawmakers are not of the view that it is possible for a sex-offender, and in particular a rapist to become ‘normal’. Therefore, not only is a sex-offenders registry a part of normal legal practice, but more significantly, once convicted of a sex offence, including sexual harassment, such a convict can never be employed or placed in certain locales. Inasmuch as I am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea that it is impossible for certain categories of individuals to be ‘saved’, bearing in mind the Christian values of the society, it always felt like doublespeak.

True, I want to know if a rapist is my neighbour. But should I not know if he is a murderer too?

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.