Domestic abuse and male culture

May 20, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I am a father, husband, grandfather and like most Guyanese males, despite our good intentions based on the script of responsibilities the culture has handed us for the last 10,000 years, we are placed in situations where the odds are not in our favour, the stage differs from the script.
It is true that domestic violence has escalated in our society like no other time in our history since the post Emancipation period 1830s-40s, my brother Abu Bakr’s letter on April 15, 09 (SN) conveys a rational perspective that, there is no guilty gender in the dynamics of normal relationships between male/female, both contribute to either an admirable relationship or one of torture and strife that leads to eventual love/hate rage and possibly murder.
Those who have never lived in a home with a companion, raising children whether common law or in marriage you cannot pronounce on an experience you can’t possibly understand from outside, this situation is also not a social band wagon to jump onto, people are hurting and more will die, until we stop beating around the bush and address the matter of domestic conflict fair and square, this is not a woman’s cause or men’s cause where nonsense like “men have been at the heart of the oppression of women for centuries”, are being asserted into a situation that lies in our national condition; tribes and nations have oppressed each other for thousands of years and many were led by Queens.
The source of many of our domestic conflicts rest in the area of economic pressures, lack of economic planning by this state have placed us in an impoverished situation where many families are struggling to put food on the table, address health and education demands and are forced to exist through hand outs, trickery and the occasional remittance. The State has failed us and we are failing our families, the younger families are more vulnerable because the value system that instructed us that an education will entitle us to a better standard of life has been upturned; the reality is that if you get into the protected criminal operations like the narco business, you’ll most likely be successful, you’ll have more ‘milk in your tea’.
Male culture presides over the duties of providing for one’s family, when we’re unable to do this we feel emasculated and insulted and we have responded to insults with how evolution has conditioned us to, we retreat into the solitude of our former initiation rites [abandoning our duties] or we attack, for example – a young cane cutter stole his boss’s gun and shot his common law wife and her new lover. In his defence he declared She ungrateful, ah ge she all me money and she seh dat cane cutter money ain’t enough, she ungrateful”, he calmly took his sentence before the Judge and proceeded into prison.
There are more demands on families, home work is given with the notion that the family has a computer and can afford the internet, there’s no way to avoid high electricity bills…I do not worry about the international economic crash; we have had that for the last 10 years; the world is now catching up with us.
I am amazed that those who profess to be alarmed by our escalating domestic violence have not made the economic connection we experience constant layoffs without social assistance; the rise in essential food stuff and lack of initiatives to explore new economic frontiers, leave the understanding that only the organised criminal and his social depredation will survive.
If a survey is done I will be certain that stress related diseases are killing more people in this country than AIDS, and men are on the forefront in stress related irrational decision making influenced by our still declining economics, the heterosexual male is a statistic in the forefront of the following social ills: as drug addicts; shot while committing petty and other crimes; die in street and bar confrontations; most likely will die on sea or in the hinterland trying to earn a living; are in the majority of the prison population; usually will die first in a marriage from years of physical and mental tiredness; are more visible sleeping on the streets as junkies or insane persons; of the street children, there are more males begging in front of popular places.
The simple reason is that with the heterosexual male, his traditional role is still intact, as provider and custodian of his dependents, in a world with more gadgets and ‘things’ to buy for a demanding family. His income has shrunk, when such social situations faced the old world they sponsored Buccaneers, raiding parties and crusades of all kinds, for the younger male in Guyana, at the scrutinizing age where are his male inspiration to come from, as I looked up as a young man to Burnham, Fred Wills at one level the street fighter at another and talked about stalwarts of our courts, poets and musicians…but, that was my day.
There is only the practical task of reaching out; social workers must be extended to low income areas; in most cases fatal domestic violence is spontaneous, it constitutes an eruption, and it requires mature and innovative methods to open any dialogue to address the core problems.
A few hours before I concluded this letter I watched on Prime News a distraught guilt filled cane cutter from Ithaca who killed his wife, that piece of footage should be examined and explored as a case study, as it provides insights; it reminds me of my Western neighbour in Robb Street where I live, there’s a woman who abuses a man in the foulest of language she continues for phenomenal hours, we don’t hear his voice, but she is vocal day and night, we can only pray.
Barrington Braithwaite

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