Dear Editor,

How do societies generate abusive behaviour on a scale that takes it out of the range of the individual aberration? And at what point does abuse targeting identifiable groups become a cultural trait with measurable occurrence rates, a victim profile and a narrative with the justifications and explanations that facilitate its perpetuation?

These are the questions that lay unsatisfied, as one reads an article by Ms Cheryl Springer entitled ‘Multi-faceted response to violence against women needed.’ It was carried in your edition of Sunday, March 29 and succeeds in accusing me of an “insidious condescension” for daring to point out that domestic violence against men needs to be exposed, discussed and treated. I am simply “seeking to pass the buck of responsibility for violent attacks from the perpetrator to the victim.”  In short I am seeking to create a single guilty party − women. Which is not at all what the piece she quoted sought to do.  In fact I was making the opposite point: no uniquely guilty sex/gender. And no wholly innocent group either.

So. How do societies manage to create victims and their violators? It is only in a complex process, in which the victim is often in total accord with the cultural narrative that explains his victimhood as inevitable, deserved, or excusable. Or due to a cause assignable to the perversity, innate and unchanging of this group of men, of this race, or these sorcerers or evil spirits, or the rich and ruling class… Or the entirely unexplainable work of an inscrutable nature or natural order. No social attitude survives the court systems, the preachments of the holy men and the displayed evidence of its barbarity unless, in the absence of coercion, it enjoys a sufficient consensual base − a mentality – supporting it. The victim often shares in the consensus. Women have been known and are recognised as one of the principal purveyors of the values, with their attitudes and cues, that lead to their problems.

The role of the evil mother-in-law in the burning and brutalising of the dowry victims, or in the forced marriages of their daughters, or in the genital mutilations, in the spiritual mutilations, in the deformation and warping of the mind abounds in the literature. Ms Springer needs to see who is dressing up and heading to backball and more, when night comes. It is mostly this group, generating its single parent mothers, that she howls about in her piece.

Women feeling it’s alright to instrumentalise themselves in a dress-up-and-wind courtship ritual that will produce the transient couple, in a culture where it is the expectation that both man and woman would have had several sexual partners during the course of a lifetime, and that discussion of values and compatibility are left to church-birds or the minorities, and that the cultural model of motherhood is the single woman with a clutch of children of disparate genealogies dragged by her past bawling into a future where, bereft of the adolescent sexuality, she faces a bleak barren middle age and death, are all working from the same script as the men who will abandon her. A society that produces men of poor quality will produce women of poor quality and even the most well-intentioned will find it hard to single out a worthy bride in the abounding mess.

In fact, in the Afro-Caribbean social constellation, marriage and prudent life has been singularly associated with the identifiably middle class values of “respectability” discussed in an old book by Peter Wilson Crabantics. But those values are at once being dissipated and reinforced according to the wavering fortunes of the Christian groups.

Ms Springer’s article reminds me of a recent piece in a French language magazine about the “femme debout,” the idealised francophone version of the woman so often found in the African diaspora. The article makes the point that it is a model demeaning of men. She refers to the matrifocal home. A lot of these women are real victims − abandoned. A lot are victors, the last man standing in the fight for power or rights that only starts after the music has stopped. Meaning that she-woman will remain the boss within those four walls. Having deftly castrated partner after partner as she infects all around her with the dysfunctional behaviour she learns at her mother knees. The last adult left standing, the kids grow up hearing that deadly phrase treated in a Barbados social study of recent vintage, “You just like yuh father.”  The curse. To the third and fourth generation.

But, the problem we have with men leaving women with kids, the “My mother who fathered me” syndrome, is specific to the Afro-Caribbean segment of the population. It has had little to do, from a sociological viewpoint, with the common forms of drunken cursing/beating to which Indo-Guyanese women would be subject.

So. One of the first things Ms Springer needs to do is to sort the victims out by race, class and social origin, etc, before embarking on theory creation based on the black experience. She should not force every discussion of a problem into the Afro-Creole mould as if the other races and experiences did not exist. Nuff child-father and child-mother is a specific problem.

Until she does so and deals with the question of the role of women in socialising the men they are bringing up, then looks at the model of mate selection and couple formation at work among us, hers will remain an emotive response to a complex behavioural problem that goes far beyond the statistics.

Finally, to suggest that a good “tongue-lashing” by a woman never broke any bones and therefore men should not even bother to complain, is to mock the real pain that many men feel, with the suicides that follow and the broken spirits and the loss of our sons and the utter and tragic sense of grief as you watch your young ones led away by a woman who, often but not always, had been socially prepared only to serve as a bird of passage, a “beatings,” in a society that in another showing of another side of its poverty, produces mostly only that.

All that having been said, we do not in any way ignore the noble and hard work by men and women of all races and sorts in creating the families, single parent or other, that have stood firm against the unclean tide.

Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr

Editor’s note

Mr Bakr is either seriously out of touch or worse, prejudiced. He assumes that only Indo-Guyanese women are subject to “the common forms of drunken cursing/beating.” He assumes that only Afro-Guyanese women have multiple partners: “Nuff child-father and child-mother is a specific problem.” He assumes I am writing from an Afro-Guyanese standpoint. He is wrong on all counts. Domestic violence exists in all races, classes and in every sector of society. Race, class and social status might enter the picture because of how people deal with the issue, and even this does not always follow a particular trend. Again, this is the sort of outmoded, bigoted attitude that perpetuates the problem.