Ending violence against women

Nov 26, 2008 Editorial

Yesterday marked the end of one year’s activities designed to support United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s multi-year UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign. Yesterday had been designated “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women” by the UN in honour of the Mirabal Sisters, (the Unforgettable Butterflies) from the Dominican Republic, who were gruesomely murdered for their political activism on November 25, 1960. The commemorated event makes the explicit link between violence against women and the chauvinism of men who use violence to keep women “in their place”.
And that is the bottom line that we have to keep in mind when all sorts of reasons are trotted out to explain why so little progress has been made to eradicate this scourge from Guyanese society. Last year, in our editorial to mark the occasion, “Killing me (not) so softly”, we asked: “Why are men so violent (to women)? What triggers that violent behaviour? The patriarchal culture? The macho image that predominates?
Modern theories seek psychological explanations. Men who have experienced rejection and feelings of inadequacy in childhood suffer in adult life from the same inadequacy and impaired ‘ego-function’, and have antisocial and pre-morbid personalities. They may also have witnessed, or suffered, violence as children.
Some researchers think that “the love/hurt/rage reactions that helpless boys feel towards their abusive, powerful parent/s were replayed by these men in their marriages. Such men experience mood swings, pain and anger, they may be seriously depressed. Poverty and monetary frustration trigger violence in many men.”
While all of that may be true, women have also undergone all sorts of dysfunctional pressures when they were children – including the violence in all shapes and forms from the hands (and other organs) of men that we are discussing – but their infliction of violence against men is but a minuscule fraction of what they suffer. Ultimately, the issue is one of power: men have it, and use that power to oppress women, who are generally bereft of it.
The effort, therefore, by the Ministry of Human Services to attack the problem of violence against women by focusing on the legal ramifications of the acts, and the succour of the violated women, while commendable and necessary, does not go to the root of the problem. It is a case of dealing with the symptoms and ignoring the cancer that continues to metastasise in every relationship between men and women at all levels of society.
In our society, notwithstanding all the protestations to the contrary, women are not considered as equal to men. The situation starts with the very birth of the girl child: she is extolled as a “delicate flower” that must be protected. Protected by the men, that is. Such a relationship is by nature unequal, since the protector inherently is assumed to have the power to protect the “flower”, which the former, just as inherently, is assumed to lack. And since we know that all power corrupts, we ought not to be surprised that the male consistently abuses the power conferred simply by his biology: biology becomes destiny.
If Guyana ever hopes to get a handle on the overwhelming one-way violence directed by males against females (who may be even socialised to accept that violence), it will have to deal with the basic inequalities that define the male and female roles in the society. These have to be engendered at two levels: at the level of values that insidiously undermine the worth of females, and in the political-legal realm. In the first level, the role of the religious bodies is critical: more than any other institution, they construct gilded cages for females.
In the political-legal realm, more job opportunities for equal wages with men is a good place to start. When, for instance, Guyanese families migrate to the North, where the struggle for gender equality has progressed much farther than here, women very quickly become empowered to take control over their lives and end abusive relationships. The simple fact that women in the developed societies have a greater access to jobs that can support them gives them the courage to resist violence from spouses and other family members.
We hope that by next year we will have made more progress than we did in the last.

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Ending violence against women

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