The Tribune

WE TALK about making the Bahamas a safe and pleasant destination for tourists to come and enjoy. We must also focus on what we need to live here. We cannot live in the plasticity of a destination. Yet, we think only about tourism. The government seems to only focus on this, too.

We certainly understand why; tourism affects everything in our small country. There was a recent article on crime and the fact that we all need to be involved in solving the issues from violence in the home to violence in the streets.

We often choose not to see the violence that we encourage and celebrate. Inequalities, especially inequalities that are engineered by the law to make some people less worthy than they really are is even more reprehensible.

The government says that it is working to undo some of the inequalities enshrined in the constitution by eliminating the gender bias of passing on citizenship for example.

Women do not have the same rights as men, simply because they are women. The referendum will hopefully change some of the legal aspects of discrimination against women, but we are happy to discriminate against them beyond that and to broadcast it.

Politicians often use their power to create their desired outcomes. They often do not consider the ultimate impact of their words and deeds on the communities they claim to represent. Or, they calculatedly and skilfully manoeuvre so that they will always have the upper hand and keep others in their ‘place’, off balance.

Oftentimes, this space between the bully and the person being bullied is created through the use of force or violence to increase the former’s power.

People see themselves as being more powerful by their ability to control others and to inflict pain and suffering on them. Parents often do this to their children. They use their power to control their children, but the violence in the home leads to dysfunctional, damaged youth who cannot function in the world.

The children see the world as unequal and feel intimidated and disempowered and so develop a need to make themselves bigger through the use of the tools they learned from their families. These tools are usually control through intimidation, force and bullying. They use their ‘power’ to bully others around them as they saw their fathers and other men in their homes do with ‘their’ women, the same women they claim to love.

Men use their power to control. They may use power to control because they see women as unequal to themselves. They can dominate the women in their lives and choose to do so.

Bullying and power inequalities work together. Bullies use their feeling of disempowerment to show that they are bigger than those around them.

When Tall Pines MP Leslie Miller made his statement in the media the other day he summarily undid the work his party claims to be doing to create equality.

He knows how powerful his words are. Did he realise though that what he said can be interpreted as him seeing women as less than men? Did he understand that it sounded like he was saying his daughter should not have the same rights as her male counterparts? How does she feel about her father and this belief in her inferiority?

We have become so happy with our ability to bully through inequality that we refuse to change. Mr Miller’s statement was only another sign of the retrograde thinking of so many public figures. They can say they want to make laws equal, but they will undermine their own projects, waste millions of tax payers’ dollars when they know that they can manipulate the entire country through their words and actions. This is power without responsibility, authority without accountability.

A man, because he is a man, can do whatever he likes, joke about beating women and then state that he does not see women as equals to men and he will vote against making progress to endow women with equal rights. Yet no woman will challenge him on his bullying ways and paternalistic, misogynistic attitudes. They accept his bullying and quietly carry on with their lives. This is a sad indictment on our society.

Mr Miller seemingly encouraged inequality. Inequalities create violence. They create power in men and an idea that they are entitled to it. They have a belief that they are cock of the rock and they can do as they please.

Some men are more powerful than others but are irresponsible with that power. They wield their power without care. When the men in our society feel threatened by a lack of power that is often experienced as lacking financial wealth, they tend to respond by violently retaking that power, they bully.

Bullying is enforcing one’s power over someone else, ensuring that one has power by focusing on the unequal strengths that exist between us and the other person we wish to make smaller.

This is often how Bahamian society treats women. Bullying is about power and inequality.

There are large inequalities in this country that we create in law and religion reinforces. These mechanisms become a part of custom and custom can be like mud, unmoving and suffocating.

We talk about everyone needing to be involved in ending violence on the streets, but when public officials use power to promote the inequalities that create violence and encourage bullying, what do we do to stop this kind of violence?

Obviously, gender equality is not seriously on the government’s agenda despite their words. Gender inequality is a serious form of violence against women and men in the Bahamas. Why spend another cent on a referendum that the government has already undermined? Mr Miller speaks for the government as soon as he opens his mouth in public.