When hands fly and women die

Jan 24, 2016 Features / Columnists, My Column

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I interviewed President David Granger early Thursday morning. The topic was domestic violence. This is something that has been a bane to the Guyanese society. Men beat women and even kill them. I had written about this before, questioning the wisdom of those men who beat their wives then go to bed with them.
I know two men who made that mistake and suffered. One of them looks none the worse for wear. He didn’t hit the woman, but he got her so angry that she waited until he fell asleep then doused him with hot oil. His neighbours said that his bellows got them out of bed in a hurry.
Then there was this man who lived with his wife at the corner of Norton and Haley Streets. They had a dispute and he took a cutlass to her. She used her right hand to defend herself and got the palm split down the middle. She became deformed for life.
When I spoke with her some months later she said that she was finished with him because he nearly killed her. Lo and behold she moved to New Jersey and shacked up with him again. If my memory serves me right, he killed her. All I could do was shake my head.
There was another man who appeared before the then magistrate Paul Fung-a-Fat. In his wisdom, Magistrate Fung-a-Fat asked him whether he had come with soap and toothbrush because he was going to jail. The man answered in the negative, so Magistrate Fung-a-Fat allowed him to go to his home in Sophia. On his way home, this man saw his wife and he battered her to death.
Just the very Thursday after I interviewed President Granger ,news came that a man was beating his wife. When the police came he simply grabbed her and jumped into a canal with her. He escaped across the canal, but people had to remove the woman’s body. Her crime? Reports said that the man found her to be unfaithful. The story appeared in yesterday’s issue of this newspaper.
President Granger said that this is a cultural phenomenon rooted in among other things, inequality. If the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the housewife, he considers her an unequal, so he treats her as such. For her part, she takes the brutality because she feels that she cannot do better because she depends on her spouse’s earning.
President Granger may be right. Cases of domestic violence are rarer when the woman earns almost equally. A lawyer who marries an equally successful public servant is unlikely to be the purveyor of violence against his wife.
There is a view that if children grow up in a home where violence is a part of life, they grow up to be violent partners. I am not so sure, because I grew up in a home where my mother often quarreled with my stepfather. He would find other things to do with his pay and come home with a pittance for my mother to feed seven children at the time.
My mother did not hesitate to lay her hands on me and my siblings, but none of us turned out to be abusers. I think our intelligence had something to do with this. We could have talked to our partners when something went awry. We resolved our conflicts.
I hasten to add that our parents never allowed any of us to resort to violence. In fact, I got angry on many occasions, because as far as my mother was concerned, my wife was always right.
The police at one time were not too supportive of victims of abuse. There were cases of the police saying that the victim should go back home and patch up the differences. This could be that the ranks know the society, know that more often than not, the victim comes from the lower income bracket and that he or she may also be an abuser.
As fate would have it, in my neighbourhood domestic violence is almost non-existent. People take their lead from their neighbours and surely do not want to be the aberration. The jail may not be a major deterrent because the very victim would visit the culprit while he serves his time.
Then there are those women who would repeatedly go to the police with a complaint and when the rank takes action the woman would step in to save the abuser. This too may have something to do with the culture in which people are expected to form lasting unions.
An offshoot of this issue of domestic violence, especially from the perspective of the man, is rape. I get the impression that men of the younger generation have little respect for women. Thus they treat them little better than some tool to be used whenever.
Parents do not spend much time getting their daughters to behave in a certain way. They allow these girls to flaunt themselves as though they are goods on a market shelf. The buyer turns out to be the abuser.
Mothers also no longer insist that their sons treat women in a certain way. I remember one woman in response to a neighbour who asked that the woman control her son, told the woman that her bull can roam and that the woman must tie her heifer.
If we see our sons as bulls and the girls as heifers we may never see an end to domestic violence.

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