Not being a habitu� of Parliament, nor, sadly, a fan of the Parliament TV or radio broadcasts, I heard rather late of Vernella Alleyne-Toppin's on-the-Hansard tirade against Opposition Leader Keith Rowley on Wednesday.What I first gleaned had to do with some muddled story about rape and Rowley's parentage. Needless to say I was as outraged as anybody else that an MP would bring such matters to Parliament. I was even more outraged when I read, on Friday morning, Alleyne-Toppin's backhanded apology for making the statements.
Rape happens in T&T no less than anywhere else, as she points out in the so-called apology; and I agree with her statement, actually, that we need to start discussing it in public fora.But we need to discuss rape as a preventable phenomenon that is all too common, and why rapists still feel rape is not a big deal. We need to discuss victim-blaming and the difficulty survivors have in gaining access to proper police investigation. We need to discuss how rape survivors are stigmatised and attacked and re-victimised by a system that puts them on trial before the rapist is even caught.
We need to discuss the fact that our law does not permit the termination of a pregnancy cause by rape unless the pregnancy endangers the life of the pregnant woman. We need to discuss the too-high financial cost of getting a termination in the private sector, which leaves safe surgical abortions out of reach of many women who want them–even women who conceive as a result of a rape.There is plenty, plenty, plenty we need to bring out in the open about rape, its perpetrators and its survivors.
But we certainly don't need to discuss whether Keith Rowley was born after his mother was raped.That someone would think it even vaguely appropriate to say that–in Parliament, to boot!–is astonishing and disgusts me.What was Alleyne-Toppin trying to prove? And who is she trying to fool by saying in her half-hearted apology that she never "intended to cause pain or suffering or to cause people to reopen old wounds of trauma"? The whole ugly spiel in Parliament was precisely calibrated to do just that.
If this were a Law and Order Special Victims Unit episode, Sgt Olivia Benson would have been appalled. As any good SVU fan knows, the heroine of this extremely popular US TV show is herself a child of a rape. Over the years that particular storyline has taught viewers how ashamed, angry, bewildered those children can be. Who with compassion would throw such a heritage in the face of someone who had been conceived under those circumstances?
One cannot slander a dead person, but surely the late Mother Rowley must be spinning in her grave to hear the allegations broadcast in Parliament on Wednesday. Even if it were true, that she had been raped as a girl and given birth to the child of the rape, whose business is it? Certainly not Vernella Alleyne-Toppin's.By speaking this "news" in Parliament, Alleyne-Toppin has only revealed herself to be an ignorant pretender, and a malicious gossip.
In the furor over the statement, and my fury at it, I almost missed the fact that there was a second part to Alleyne-Toppin's allegations. She alluded to another rape, and other children born of same. I am not trying to parse any of these statements for truth or untruth; I don't know what happened and I wouldn't put my head on a block for any politician. However, if Vernella Alleyne-Toppin knows of a rape, is it her duty to gossip about it in Parliament or to bring it to the attention of the police, whose responsibility it is to investigate crime?
Surely the welfare of the child should be uppermost, particularly to a Minister in the Ministry of Social Development. Rather than using the incident to score political points, as certainly was her intention on Wednesday, shouldn't she have thought to raise the issue with social workers or clergy in the area where the child is living?
I'm writing this on Friday, so I don't know what developments will take place over the weekend. I earnestly hope that by the time this column is published today, Vernella Alleyne-Toppin will be known as a former Minister in the Ministry of Social Development. Surely that is not too much to ask. And may her replacement know unequivocally that using rape as a political football is wholly unacceptable.