In The Diaspora
Part II
Alissa Trotz is the weekly editor of the In the Diaspora Column
A few weeks ago we carried a column, Stop the Slaughter, by Luke Daniels, a British-based Guyanese domestic violence counselor, which was published the week we learned of the alleged murders of Ramattie Deonauth by her son, and Rajpattie Jagroop by a man who had been spurned by her daughter. Since then there have been further reports, the most recent being the murder-suicide reported yesterday, in which 30 year old Kathleen Mo-A-Lin, mother of three young children, was poisoned and bludgeoned to death, her mouth glued shut to apparently prevent her from calling for help or to ensure the poison did its deadly work. The list of atrocities grows: a father who poisoned his children to get back at their mother; a teenager whose eye was clawed out with a hammer by his stepfather; an elderly woman raped in her nursing home; a woman doused with kerosene oil and stabbed so hard the knife broke off inside her. The levels of cruelty and anger against those with less power among us – women, children, the elderly – seem almost inhuman, and they also appear to be on the increase. There is barely a week that goes by without a report of another woman killed or brutalized, and the danger is that this will become normalized. We are horrified but we come to expect these stories (will we become numb to these accounts? Are we there already?). Women get reduced to the images of their bruised and battered bodies. What should be an abnormal state of affairs is rendered spectacularly normal.
To be sure there seem to be responses and initiatives – a Domestic Violence Act that is on the books, the existence of a National Domestic Violence Policy Committee, training of police units to address domestic violence, President Jagdeo’s establishment, in November 2008, of a $15m fund for a domestic violence awareness campaign – but how does one measure the distance between these official responses and the realities on the ground? The layperson cannot be blamed for wondering what all of this boils down to in the face of clear signs that the violence is not abating. What good did heightened police sensitivity do Kathleen Mo-A-Lin, given one grieving sister’s remarks that “I hope the police use this as an eye-opener and help women in this situation…because everyday she went was today tomorrow, today tomorrow and now look wah happen…the police must listen sometimes?” Red Thread, which has been compiling media reports of violence against women, had by mid-July recorded the murders of over twenty women at the hands of men they knew for this year alone. This number does not include other reported incidents where women survived. Add to this the obvious fact that newspapers report only the most extreme of cases, and we will recognize that what we have on our hands is an epidemic of violence against women. Given the abysmally low numbers of cases that make it through the courts – if they make it to court at all – with a conviction, we are also dealing with the absence of justice, a fact that surely emboldens the perpetrators. There is a wider significance to this, in that there is an increasing culture of impunity in Guyana that is not just confined to domestic violence, and a growing sense that the powerful among us – defined in various ways- always get off or don’t have to answer for their actions.
Over twenty years ago, when I was working in Albouystown, an elderly woman remarked that because it was a low-income community, houses were built close to each other, making privacy often difficult to achieve. When quarrels or fights took place, everybody knew your business. She went on to comment that in middle-class areas, houses were further apart with walls and fences, so no-one could hear what goes on. The result, she pointed out, was that places like the one I grew up in were seen as nice, quiet areas while communities like Albouystown were seen as loud. I recount this conversation here for those of us who imagine that violence against women happens only or primarily among poor people, an impression one could easily get from reading the newspapers, the sole exception perhaps being the account by Varshnie Jagdeo of the emotional and psychological abuse she experienced from her husband, President Bharrat Jagdeo. I have met middle-class women who ended up fleeing Guyana altogether to escape abusive husbands (in the absence of sufficient shelter space in Guyana, I know of other women who fled to Venezuela, or stayed put because there was simply nowhere else to go or hide. Others end up taking their lives). Violence and terror lurk inside the houses of many middle-class families. We know this but whisper it only. Respectability and showing face can be powerful silencers, and particularly when the perpetrators hold economic, political and cultural power in our society.
Several of the letters to the editor have insightfully commented on the need to challenge our internalization and reproduction of cultures of violence, like ‘if mih man don’t beat me, he don’t love me’, or the widespread belief that beating children is not violence but discipline. We also need to ensure that we do not domesticate our discussions of domestic violence. For starters we should recognize that violence is increasing right across the Caribbean and put Guyana’s predicament in this broader regional context, looking for connections while also stressing what is specific to our own situation. One of the glaring contradictions for me is between official local statements against domestic violence (however strongly worded) and a government policy that enthusiastically embraces the free market principles of structural adjustment as the way forward for Guyana. Around the early 1990s some feminist researchers began raising the question of the relationship between neoliberal economic policies and increased domestic violence, and although to my knowledge no systematic data exists for the Caribbean, I am convinced there is a link to be made. Adjustment policies promote individualism. They aggressively shrink the state and require drastic cuts in spending on social services, education, health. They increase the cost of living by removing subsidies and price controls and devaluing the currency. They download responsibilities to the household and onto the shoulders of women in particular. What results is a climate of increasing economic and social insecurity, coupled with an emerging ethos of individualism, everyone looking out for him or herself. Migration as an economic strategy – not being able to make ends meet at home – splits families and interrupts generational transfers. The dense webs of connection and interdependency that structured relationships and created bonds of trust and respect are severely eroded. Under this new dispensation of survival politics, underlying power differentials that already exist get accentuated. It is not that violence against women did not exist before President Desmond Hoyte introduced the Economic Recovery Programme back in the mid 1980s (Empty Rice Pot was what some in the then opposition PPP rightly dubbed it. Remember that? What happened once they came to power?). It is that the increases we are seeing are only partly related to more reporting and awareness, and that in this new climate of economic uncertainty and where safety nets have been removed, women are made even more vulnerable to violence. Thus the heroic and absolutely necessary actions of agencies like Help and Shelter can do only so much, for the official support they and other such groupings receive can only be characterised as symbolic, a bandaid to stop a gaping wound. They are swimming against the riptide of a development approach that is not people or community-centred, that is based on sacrificing the vulnerable among us – the poor, women, children, the aged, the disabled. Responding comprehensively to this epidemic of violence will require us to recognize first and foremost that becoming our sisters’ keepers and engaging communities – across class, across race – to confront the violence is fundamentally at odds with the path that Guyana, like the rest of the Caribbean, is on.
