Intimate Partner Violence; is enough ever enough?

Feb 05, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols
Last week it was about the children – victims of adult neglect, abuse, and murder. This week the focus shifts; the children are now adults – men and women in intimate relationships. Fine, when the relationship is mutually beneficial, balanced and stable, but when hot ‘love’ starts to cool and intimacy is overshadowed by dominance, it could be the beginning of hell up on earth for one partner or the other, and in some instances, both.
They have been ridiculed and belittled, cuffed, kicked, stabbed, slashed, and hacked with knives and cutlasses, or blasted with guns, burnt with fire and acid, and in a few instances forced to ingest poisonous liquids. In the majority of cases these acts are carried out by ‘loving’ partners and in marriage, by spouses who promised under oath to love, cherish and honour. In Guyana women are overwhelmingly the targets, but as is becoming more evident, not exclusively.
This kind of violence is part of a huge and complex phenomenon that also involves acts of covert sexual violence, stalking, and psychological aggression. The modern name for this combo is Intimate Partner Violence. ‘Partners’ include current or former spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends, sexual partners, and persons dating, embracing both heterosexual and same-sex couples, all caught in a perpetuating cycle of abuse.
In Guyana, ‘Enough is enough’ is one of the most clichéd and useless phrases ever uttered. So when one young woman recently said those words to her abusive ‘child father’ after he had choked her blue one time too many, he probably dismissed it for what it had become – of no effect! After all he’d done it before. There would have been the tearful reports at the police station; the perfunctory responses from officers accustomed to such accounts and in many instances the ‘it-won’t-happen-again’ make-ups that frustrate the more diligent ones.
Just like the image of Neena Blair last week, it was a picture, a composite of the young woman this time, which shook me. Half of it showed a smiling, attractive young lady; the other half showed a hospitalized woman in obvious distress, displaying little resemblance to the other. In my heart I wished her a quick recovery but with an almost hopeless undertone because I feel she may never smile so effortlessly again. A dousing with acid will do that to you.
Tales of domestic abuse/violence are as old as the proverbial hills and certainly far more numerous. Historians have concluded that cavemen dragged women by the hair into their dens and did to them what male animals do to their females; no questions asked and no pleas entertained with the ‘understanding’ that it was simply the way things were done then. (Admitting how much or how little that has changed over the millennia may be a question of where you stand on issues of feminism, dominance, and gender role assignments)
Relationship abuse statistics in Guyana are, to use a mildly non-threatening term, high. It becomes more frighteningly so if you believe the social workers, nurses, women’s organizations, and even the police, who say the numbers are way below the cases that go officially unreported. And you don’t have to be a sociologist or an Einstein to recognize that apart from going unreported there would be cases that go unrecognized, maybe doubling these numbers to the tens of thousands. I think it’s actually that bad.
I could, with some research, fill this column with a thousand names and stories of IPV victims, but to what effect? So much has been said and attempted in addressing the scourge that it is almost pointless to repeat it. I wonder sometimes if, despite all the efforts by the government, the churches, the women’s groups and NGOs, even working with international agencies like the United Nations, CEDAW, CAFRA, and a plethora of smaller groups, there is a kind of national resignation to the inevitability of it, especially where women are concerned.
I make that last small point again because the relationships issue, and life itself, is like a coin, and the flip side reveals the underbelly of an even less-reported phenomenon – the abuse of males physically and more subtly under the whiplash of verbal, emotional, and psychological dominance. Name-calling, the silent treatment, public humiliation, and withholding sex are among the top weapons used by women. Lesser ones are biting and spitting, destroying possessions, and harming pets. (Remember ‘Fatal Attraction’)
Many men dismiss the notion, masking their vulnerability with what I called in another story that ‘macho camaraderie thing.’ You don’t tell your gym pal or your drinking buddy that your wife or girlfriend belittled or bitch-slapped you, and humiliated you by questioning your virility in the most unflattering way; they just don’t go with rum and ginger; bars and barbells. In a recent article, the Huffington Post reported that one in four men in the United States will become a victim of IPV. But of course it’s the female we most worry about.
Being essentially mild-mannered, I’ve always wondered why so many men find it necessary, even obligatory, to dominate women in the fashion they do. Maybe I was lucky to have strict but mild-mannered parents, and sisters bonded by familial affection that outlasted the occasional sibling spats. In any case the violent aspect of domestic abuse came as a rude shock to me after my family moved from a rustic East Coast village to Georgetown; maybe I was simply more sheltered there.
In newspaper columns, on the streets, and around the market places in Georgetown and elsewhere, people relate empathetically with victims of extreme abuse; particularly the ones that end in murder. Many call for something more than the endless rounds of talks, statistics, and jail sentences, and advocate a return to hanging, public whipping with the ‘cat’, and a new addition – castration, for the men of course.
Bearing that last drastic measure in mind, I wonder what women who are equally culpable would get. As far as I recall, the last woman hanged in Guyana was Kathleen Fullerton nearly 70 years ago; and as that old saw declares ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander’. The last men on the gallows were Michael Archer and Peter Adams several decades later, in 1997.
While hanging is still constitutionally valid, as far as I am aware, death row inmates at Lot 12 Camp Street can still mount legal challenges to it, and of course there are those ‘tricky’ international laws and conventions, to which Guyana is a signatory, that embolden the condemned in asserting their human rights against cruel and unusual punishment. After the psychological terror of an indeterminate wait and the reading of a death warrant, a thousand pounds of torque to the neck, compressing blood vessels, breaking neck and severing spinal cord may be considered just that.
These barbaric punishments may deter abusers for a while, but people will continue to humiliate, hurt, and kill their partners. Maybe when we can more fully probe the deep recesses of the human mind and heart we’ll get a clearer picture of at least why they do it. In the meantime here’s a bit of simple advice which, because we’re all human and crave the attention we get in such relationships, may not be the most effective. But here goes.
Young men and women, boys and girls, get to know your partner as intimately as possible without actually getting intimate, sexually. Talk with them in as many situations and locales as possible. Get to know their parents, siblings, and friends and observe how they treat, and relate to, them. Observe their attitudes too; certain traits run in families. Don’t rush it. Let the weeks and months roll by. Stay apart every now and then and give them some space; maybe even create a diversion or contrive a problem just to see their reaction. And when they start to cling too much, or tell you what to wear, and who not to speak with, run. Literally, figuratively, and diplomatically – Run!

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