Social Exclusion in Barbados

Most people who know very little about Barbados often stereotype Bajans as passive snobs proud of coming from a country known as “Little England.” What they often fail to recognise is what that Little England legacy means for many Bajans in terms of social exclusion.

Media reports on the launch of the Country Assessment Of Living Conditions highlight the fact the individual and household poverty in Barbados has almost doubled over the last 20 years.  The reason given for the increase in poverty are the barriers to access created by stigma, inter-generational poverty and lack of educational and skills qualifications despite high government spending on education. It was also reported that discrimination based on “age, sex, area of residence, religion, disability, sexuality, migrant status or HIV status”, and that the attitudes of people toward “sex workers, the disabled, Rastafari, gays, the homeless, people living with HIV/AIDS, to mention some . . . meant lack of access to several public amenities and services, and therefore limited their ability to enhance their living conditions”.

The report goes on to note that only 36% of children in Barbados live in homes with both their parents.  86% of mothers are present in the home but only 40% of fathers.  The report also reinforced what has been a long-time fact in the region,  that households headed by women predominate amongst poor households.

The report also mentioned incest and sexual exploitation of both boys and girls by adult men.

The effects of being poor in Barbados were noted:

the Country Assessment also indicated that the high cost of living, particularly food and utility bills, were having a negative effect on Barbadians’ living conditions and their ability to meet basic needs.

“Respondents identified some of the devastating effects that living in poor conditions and in poverty have on their health, on their relationships, on how they are treated by others in relation to social and familial exclusion, and on their self-esteem,” the study said.

“Many stressed the serious psychological and emotional damage that they experience, including stress, anxiety, depression, frustration, helplessness and powerlessness. These issues are all strongly interrelated with three main characteristics: unemployment, low-paying/part-time employment (under-employment), high levels of dependency in households, and social and familial exclusion.”

The report provides a lot of important data from which sound social policy can be made.  For me it suggests that social mobility in Barbados has shifted, has become more difficult.  (Something I had personally observed as well.) That Barbadian society has become more exclusionary, shutting out people who come from poor families or working class neighbourhoods, who live with disabilities or HIV, who are poor migrants, LGBT and poor or young and poor.  Government spends lots of money on an education system that serves to reproduce the class system rather than challenge it.  The result is that while many children from poor families do excel, many many others drop out with no qualifications and many barriers to steady work.

As Barbados works towards a National Gender Policy it has this very important research to guide the policy-making process.  Addressing social exclusion in Barbados must be high on the objectives of the Gender Policy.

It’s also time CODE RED for gender justice! to conceptualize a project which addresses social exclusion.

 

Caribbean bloggers take on race, class, gender, nation… and Nicki Minaj

Three very popular Caribbean bloggers have written recently about gender, race, class and nation in the region. These are must-read articles, check them out:

Annie Paul writes about the Caribbean Court of Justice Case currently being heard.  The case concerns the infringement of the rights (and sexual assault) of CARICOM citizen and Jamaican national, Shanique Myrie.  She examines notions of gendered respectability and class and how they are at the heart of this case:

This landmark case is not only about nationality, it’s also about ‘class’, the ungainly elephant in the room no one wants to explicitly mention. It is important to portray Myrie as ‘decent’ ‘respectable’ and ‘sober’ because the image of Jamaicans in the region is overwhelmingly influenced by the higglers, DJs and hustlers who often represent the face of Jamaica,  visiting, even migrating to other countries, where they are not always welcome.

Why? because these enterprising but capitally-challenged individuals (ie owning  little capital, whether financial or social) often violate all the dearly held norms of ‘decency’ ‘respectability’ and ‘good taste’ with their choice of garments, raw speech and boisterous behaviour. They regularly transgress the zealously guarded borders of civility and decorum as much as the borders of nation states which under the new Chaguaramas Treaty they now have a right to breach.

Perhaps this was why Myrie was given the finger when she arrived in prim and proper Barbados, regionally glossed as ‘Little England’. Not just because she was Jamaican but because she was perceived to be a particular kind of Jamaican. So @Emilynationwide was right to emphasize the outfit and demeanour of Ms Myrie. It may be extremely germane in the instant case.

The Eternal Pantomime examined  how race and class intersect to render some Trinbagonians as “sub-humans” or “niggas” who should be shot according to one journalist and his facebook friends:

Yesterday a man lost his entire family in seconds. Seconds. We can’t return them to him. Yesterday and this morning that man is firm in the knowledge that he may never receive justice…ever. Because in this corrupt narco state of a country the cliques protect their own. In the midst of wrenching grief, this man knows that the person responsible for killing his family may never be brought to justice. The community of Sea Lots responded angrily, impulsively and violently. The police and armed services responded back.

Meanwhile, on a computer somewhere, a citizen, who happens to be a freelance journalist posts up a rant. It is both classist and racist. He sincerely believes that poor(economically) black people who protest should be shot and killed and cabbages planted on them. He is unapologetic. Within seconds, other people who have little to no clear details of the tragedy, but who also have a deep and abiding disgust for poor black people because they believe them to be a burden on society, click like on his status and add comments. Of the five people who clicked like, one is a police officer. Another one is a friend of mine; and yet another is an online persona I know who is quite comfortable with using the word Negro to describe and define Afro- descended people.

Tillah Willah took umbrage with Nicki Minaj’s description of Trinidad & Tobago as “nothing” demonstrating the extent to which this characterization relies on a homogenised understanding of blackness as outside of humanity.   It is a critique worth noting especially as some feminist scholars think of Minaj as queer, subversive and transgressive.

Maybe it’s all that peroxide that’s eaten through Nicki Minaj’s scalp and started affecting her brain.
Or maybe it’s just the contempt that all Trinbagonians have for their own. You know, the place that gives you so much, that all you can manage to do is bad talk it at every opportunity.
I’m not, as you might have guessed, a fan of Ms. Minaj. There is a lot of really good hip hop out there and she is not it.
In a moment of empathy, Ms. Minaj reached out to an American Idol competitor – a refugee from Liberia – to say that she was so happy that the two of them had made it alive out of their horrible countries and come to the earthly paradise known as the United States of America to have a shot at being human.
In one fell swoop she perpetuates the myth of the savage Third World and also the streets paved with gold that exist outside of these Third World hell holes.
You really have to wonder if Ms. Minaj has some sort of post traumatic stress disorder. But if she does, if she is yet to deal with the traumas of her childhood, she should see a specialist about it, instead of going on American television and describing her country, my country as ‘nothing’.
Also I am curious about the something that she says that she is now. I suppose having millions of dollars is success. It doesn’t matter if you get this money by acting like Oversexed Barbie. It doesn’t matter if you are part of a media machine that sexualises girlhood, that preaches bamsie shaking as the sure fire way to get attention. And if you’re a black woman of any kind of popularity you start to get progressively whiter the more famous you get.
It fits the mainstream world media agenda for us to continue to think that anywhere in the so-called Third World is backward and savage. Trinidad and Liberia are one and the same, although Trinidad has not had decades of civil war. Far from being an expression of solidarity with a fellow person of colour, she is spewing the same ignorance that lumps us all into one amorphous bunch of black savages who can’t help but kill each other.
Oh and by the way? Violence and poverty do not exist in Queens. Racism is a long past dream and we’re all just getting along and having a big old party.

From local journalists, to the Caribbean court of justice to Nicki Minaj, there’s lots to unpack about our understanding of blackness as outside of the human and how this is mediated by gender, class and nation.

Join the discussion…

Edited to add

Negril Stories also wrote about the Shanique Myrie case in an aptly named post “I am Shanique Myrie or Jamaicans and Women are also Human”. Check it out.

Love as Violence, Violence as Love

Caribbean media have framed two recent stories about “domestic violence” as “love stories”.

Nation News Barbados begins its its story about a man who shot a woman in her head, leaving her blind in one eye with “MICHAEL GODDARD knows how it feels to love so strongly that you are pushed to the limits to commit the ultimate crime.”

The story goes on to say that he attributes his premeditated violence against his former girlfriend to “lack of communication from both of us”.

That a man could seek to have his partner share in the responsibility of waylaying and attempting to execute her demonstrates what  researchers in the Caribbean and elsewhere have documented: that in talking about their violence against women, men who commit acts of violence often distance themselves from the violence, refuse to take responsibility and hold their partners responsible for the violence (and are particularly silent on the sexual violence they commit). For example, researcher Raquel Sukhu of Trinidad & Tobago concludes

In all cases, the men presented negative assessments of their female partners, and women in general, and where isolated incidents of physical abuse were acknowledged, the women were blamed, the extent of injury minimized, and men’s responsibility denied or the violence was justified by her prior actions. I concluded that each one was violent, despite their protests and denials, as a result of triangulation of sources of data and methods of data collection. The men demonstrated, despite their claims to ‘‘not thinking’’ and ‘‘not remembering,’’ the intention to cause harm to their partners and engaged in goal-oriented violence. Typically, incidents of violence are characterized by the men as accidents, happening in the heat of the moment, and not intended to cause harm. Simultaneously,
however, these incidents are seen as justified in light of the actions of the woman. While it was difficult to obtain admissions of specific incidents of violence from the men, their overall accounts reflected this feeling of justification of their actions as we will clearly see in the excerpts.

In another recent story from Guyana, a 19 year-old man was killed by his 38-year-old step uncle who also attacked and injured the young man’s girlfriend.  This story was also framed by the media as a love story. While the article itself suggests that the young man was in fact stalked by his step uncle, previously attacked by him and possibly sexually abused  the report still referred to the relationship as “a love affair” and the victim as the “lover” of the man who killed him.

Both reports use love and jealousy as a rationale for murder as does Goddard in his interview. The media’s recourse to a love story framing suggests that this is a logic that is shared by or at least intelligible to the public.  Love and violence go hand in hand. “Love” allows men who commit violence to distance themselves from that violence and hold their partners responsible for it.

Often when domestic violence is talked about you hear very little about love beyond the oft-repeated “some women believe that if he don’t beat me he don’t love me.” Perhaps we need to examine love more closely and figure out just why our understanding of love encompasses ownership, violence and coercion. What role does “love” play in child sexual abuse and early sexual initiation in the Caribbean? What  do we mean by love and do women and men, boys and girls have different understandings of love? What is the relationship between love and relations of power based on gender, age etc? Is love itself  a relation of power?

 

Sexual Violence is a Men’s Issue

Caribbean journalist Ricky Singh indicts regional and national women’s groups, women lawyers and women politicians for being silent in the face of sexual violence against women.

Roberta Clarke, on her Roots and Rights blog, pointed out that for the last 20 years women’s organisations have in fact been speaking out, advocating for legislation, running shelters and crisis centres  etc. Caribbean women have been anything but silent in the face of relentless and ongoing violence. In the 1980s schoolgirls in St. Vincent and the Grenadines marched to protest sexual violence and in 2013 women’s groups across the region continue to do unrecognised, invisibilised work.

When it comes to sexual violence the overwhelming majority of persons who are raped or sexually assaulted are women and girls and the overwhelming majority of rapists are men.  Men and boys too are victims of rape (though not at the same rates as women and girls) and in these cases too, men are the overwhelming majority of rapists.  It should therefore be self-evident that sexual violence is a men’s issue.  And the more appropriate question to ask is why men as the majority of elected leaders in the region, as individuals and members of various men’s organisations are not doing everything in their power to end sexual violence. Rape is a men’s issue.  Ending rape, speaking out against violence against women and girls is the collective responsibility of men.

Yet, men collectively, as major power brokers in the region, are silent.

Why are Caribbean men silent on rape? Why did it not occur to Rickey Singh to ask this question? Why is men’s silence not shocking?

Everybody should be outraged when schoolgirls are sexually harassed in the street and on public transportation, when women are killed by their intimate partners, when police officers turn away rape survivors for being naked, when payments are accepted in lieu of prosecution in cases of child sexual abuse, when our legal system supports this form of injustice, when deputy commissioners of police suggest that teen girls are the ones responsible for the sexual crimes against them. Everybody should be outraged.  Not just women.  Not just the handful of women parliamentarians.  Not just overworked and underfunded women’s organisations. EVERYBODY.  And that includes men who for too long have been shamefully silent.  (Big up attorney Lennox Sankersingh and the other lawyers who have offered to support rape survivors throughout the legal process in Trinidad and Tobago).

Why are men silent on sexual violence against women and girls?

What does their silence communicate?

Does it communicate an acceptance of rape culture, of gender inequality? An understanding that violence against women and girls and the threat of it is part of what helps to maintain male privilege? A desire to see that privilege maintained at all costs?

It’s time we heard from Caribbean men what they intend to do to end gender-based violence.

I’m all ears…

Barbados Media Treats Mental Health Issues With lack of Compassion, Understanding

Dear Editor:

I read with sorrow the news you carried of the woman who was hospitalised after walking naked in Broad Street.  But before I go further, perhaps I can first entreat that you not accompany this letter with her image as you did the story you carried.  And may I say that I understand your need to be current with the news.

As someone who lives with the occasional ill health that accompanies bi-polar disorder, I appreciate your image’s predicament.  The sense of judgement that most of you at Barbados Today and most of your readers take for granted is sometimes lost in the moments of crisis suffered by we who are diagnosed with mental ill health.

Nevertheless, we the diagnosed mentally ill live among you.  Most of us even live well as no doubt you do.  Our error is in thinking that you view us as one of you, and could depend on your empathy to shelter our moments of self harm.

Might I genuinely wish that none of you, including the many who will tout our images of nakedness on facebook and blackberries, ever share our shame and social neglect.

Guidance,

Margaret D. (Kawamuinyo) Gill

Letter to the Editor published here with permission.