Dear Editor,
Much has been said and written about Chris Brown coming to Guyana for a Boxing Day concert sponsored by a businessman, organised by Hits & Jams and given a tax holiday by the government.
On the one hand, there are those who are appalled that a convicted domestic violence abuser should be setting foot in a country where 26 women and counting have been killed by their partners this year and thousands of others beaten and otherwise abused. On the other, there are those who say he’s learnt his lesson and deserves a second chance and that they and Guyana will benefit from his concert.
What do we know?
Chris Brown was arrested, charged, convicted and took a serious hit in the media and to his career for beating Rihanna.
This is more than we can say for many Guyanese men who beat their partners, including a number of well-known people who continue to masquerade as pillars of society without let or hindrance.
One cannot however help but think that Chris Brown was lucky to escape a custodial sentence and that the leniency he was shown was not unconnected to his celebrity status.
Chris Brown completed his 52 weeks of domestic violence counselling.
The purpose of perpetrator domestic violence counselling is for the abuser to learn about the need for behaviour and attitude change and for those changes to take place. It can and does work, but not in every case.
Here in Guyana, some magistrates refer abusers to Help & Shelter for counselling but we are already overburdened with counselling survivors and our efforts over the years to encourage other NGOs to provide this service have met with limited success.
An audit is being done to clarify whether he has in fact completed the 1,400 hours of community labour he was ordered to do, he failed a random drug test in September 2012 (for marijuana; he said he has a medical marijuana card and that drug was used legally in California, to where his probation was transferred) and may have violated his probation travel restrictions. He is to return the court on 1 November 2012 for a probation violation hearing.
He says he’s learned from his mistake.
There is some doubt as to whether he has. In March 2011, New York police were called in when he trashed an ABC studios dressing room and hurled a chair at a window after an interview about his beating of Rihanna, and he has been sued for damage done to a nightclub in June 2012 for failing to do anything to try to stop a brawl between his and another singer’s entourage.
Rihanna has forgiven and taken him back.
Some abusers do change their attitude and behaviour and so deserve a second chance. But some don’t and celebrity status does not make Rihanna any better judge of whether Chris Brown deserves his second chance than all those women who have given their men one and ended up beaten again or dead. We have not seen any reports of Rihanna herself having had counselling, which is important for domestic violence victims to deal with the trauma of abuse and to be empowered to rebuild lives free from violence and the threat of violence. But whatever we think of Rihanna’s choice, it was hers to make.
In Guyana, the freedom of many women to choose whether or not to take their men back is still restricted by dependence on their abusers to maintain them and their children.
What we don’t know is whether Chris Brown is really deserving of a second chance. Some have pointed to the commendation he received from the judge on completion of his year’s counselling and he’s recently been applauded for volunteering with an NGO that works against abuse, but it could be argued that everything he has done by way of apology and reparation is because he was either required by the court to do it or it was in his interest to appear to be a changed man if his career was to take off again, as it has very successfully done.
His fans in Guyana seem more interested in the good time they’ll have at his concert, the promoter and organiser in the money they’ll make out of him and the government in the boost to tourism and hence the economy that having him here will bring than whether he’s genuinely reformed. Those who have spoken out against his coming have been lambasted as mean, dishonest and hypocritical, but they don’t have the power to put the abusers among us behind bars and in rehab programmes and their agenda is not dictated by self-interest but the interest of the tens of thousands of past, present and future victims and survivors of abuse and a genuine concern at the message that welcoming a convicted abuser – reformed or not – sends to them.
As an organisation that works against domestic violence, we join those who are against the Chris Brown concert.
It is however a virtual certainty that the concert will go ahead (unless he’s slapped with travel restrictions at his hearing in November) and will be a huge success. It is also more than likely that he will be here for such a short time that we won’t be any the wiser after he’s left than we are now as to whether he’s likely to abuse again. The only real test of this is time, and in our view, not enough has yet passed.
Perhaps those who, like ourselves, will be boycotting the concert, may choose to donate the cost of the ticket they will not be purchasing to an NGO of their choice that supports women, men and children affected by domestic violence and so make a tangible contribution to the work being done to address the problem.
Yours faithfully,
Salima Bacchus-Hinds
Colin Marks
Danuta Radzik
Denise Dias
Josephine Whitehead
For Help & Shelter
