A simple rally became a political issue

Nov 28, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

This past week a group of women hosted a forum devoted to highlighting violence against women, and in some cases men, in a domestic situation. It was advertised mainly by word of mouth and by friends telling each other about the event through social networking.
The first thing that struck me was the fact that the women who organized the forum were those who mainly live overseas and with one exception, were Guyanese.
These women, one of whom is a former First lady in Guyana, recognized that increasingly men were abusing their spouses, sometimes to the extent that death resulted.
As far back as I could remember there was domestic violence. On the West Demerara where I spent my early years I would hear women screaming and my mother would remark “X beating he wife again.” After a while I grew accustomed to X beating his wife because the following morning while she would be sporting a few bruises, many to the eye, she would continue life as though she had just passed through a normal phase of her life.
Such beatings were commonplace in many households and more often than not the husband was drunk at the time.
When I became older and moved to East Coast Demerara, men continued to beat women. In most cases the victim was a girlfriend.
Sometimes the beatings would occur on the roadway as they were heading home from a party.
The reasons were varied. Sometimes the beating would result from the woman dancing in a certain way with another man.
Over the years I happened to witness many of these abuses and all that changed was the number of such incidents. In one case I recalled a woman telling a friend that the man beat the woman as though she were his wife.
This suggested that men were entitled to beating their wives, and coming from a woman, I recognized how pervasive this social behaviour was.
That the women took it also suggested that they were conditioned to accept such beatings. There was the phrase, “If he ain’t beat me he ain’t love me.”
And it had to be a case of the woman accepting the man’s love, because quite a few women turned on people who intervened to save them from further abuses. “This is me and me man story,” they would say.
The police at one time actually accepted this reasoning because in many cases they would pronounce that they cannot get involved in husband and wife story.
Some women eventually moved out of the abusive situation but there were those who went back.
Others moved out and were tracked and sometimes killed. I distinctly remember one particular incident. A woman went to the courts because she was abused.
The magistrate, after hearing the case, informed the man that he would be going to jail. For some strange reason, the magistrate allowed the man to go home for some accessories.
This man is still in jail. He went home to his place of abode in South Sophia. En route, he confronted his wife and killed her by beating her with a plank. That incident still lives with me, and the magistrate, who is no longer on the bench, knows that this incident need not have occurred.
There was one woman who lived at the corner of Norton and Haley Streets, Wortmanville. Her spouse took a cutlass to her neck. She blocked the chop and ended up being disfigured for life. The blow split her hand.  She left him or I should say he left her after that.
This foolish woman left Guyana and strange as it may seem, she sent for the same man. This was idiocy of the highest order. I suppose that she is not alone in such behaviour because there must be others.
In the United States where many of the organizers of Thursday’s event live there is domestic abuse, but the male spouse is dealt with condignly. He is even evicted from his home and ordered to find somewhere else to live.
In Guyana, though, it had to take some form of agitation for the authorities to clampdown on domestic violence. I have not done a survey but I am sure to find that about eighty per cent of women in a relationship have been beaten and the remainder, verbally abused. There are not too many of us who could say that they have not witnessed their father abusing their mother.
Then something struck me. At the forum at the Georgetown Cricket Club ground, Minister of Human Services and Social Security, Priya Manickchand was there.
She talked at length with the organizers, and I was left with the impression that she was glad for any support she could get to end this thing called domestic abuse.
However, it appeared to me that at the political level the government was prepared to ignore the event. In fact, for the state media it was a non-event. There was not a line or a television report.
I was forced to ask myself whether everything in Guyana has to be us and them. Because Varshnie and some other women were involved we had better ignore the event.
This is sad because on the government side there was a corresponding programme entitled, ‘Stop the black and blue’. This was held in Berbice. That event did not go unnoticed by the private media because domestic violence is not a political issue.
I hope that someone would explain to me why the divide in coverage. It was stupid, to say the least, because many in the state media are not strangers to domestic abuse and need help. I know quite a few, even some at the administrative level.

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