The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHEL BENNETT

WE have boasted of how well women are doing in the political and social spheres in the Bahamas, yet we cannot vote for a woman to be leader of a political party.

As the judicial system fails us, murderers get out on bail and organise the killing of someone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; the country complains about the random nature of criminals lining rocks across roads to steal people’s money, but who actually killing someone.

The judicial system has proven that it cannot handle the pressure, but the men talk about the good it is doing. We boast about all the progress we are making as a country as we fall further behind on far too many indices and as the gap widens between the top and the middle, not even mentioning the bottom.

As violence and crime rise, the irony is that, the very people who say they want to change the problem have done little to alter the flow.

In fact, when the FNM was ousted from government by the PLP’s promise to improve the crime situation, the problem worsened.

Yes, they certainly got tough on immigration, but that means picking up documented as well as undocumented men, women and children.

When the economy is in the outhouse, being tough on immigration is always the winning ticket. At the same time, the distance between women and men has also increased. We are apparently unconvinced that we have problems with women’s equality in the Bahamas. We claim that this is normal and acceptable. We throw all kinds of other matters under the microscope or put the focus on everything else, but the glaring truth is that we have an extremely unequal society.

When the deputy leader of the Opposition lost her bid to become the new leader of the party, most of the bystanders in the event argued that, had she been a man, she would probably have won. That tells us how concerned the Bahamas is with maintaining its power imbalances. We seem disinterested in really changing the society for the better, yet we continue to talk about improving society.

True, we can at least say that Loretta Butler-Turner lost because she was a woman, but who is going to come up with the next step?

What could the next step be? Just the way the government is going to import yet another expert consultant with no local knowledge to measure the effectiveness of our VAT system (after it is implemented), is the way we seem to be doing business when it comes to equality.

We say that we are alarmed by the large numbers of young, working-class males in prison, yet we choose to do nothing to rectify the problem or even to identify it. We simply say that they are bad. They need to be disciplined. How many of us ask how rehabilitative is prison, really?

We simply send these ‘criminal elements’ to jail and turn the key, and then expect when they come out that they will be newly ‘angelicised’. Yet, in fact, they emerge worse than when they were incarcerated. If one wants to create more hardened criminals, send the youth to jail. Thus is the way the system functions.

We have never stopped to ask how many of them have been abused; how many of them have been molested. We simply lock them up. So when they get out and graduate from petty crime to killing, that’s what we expect of them, or are we shocked?

We refuse to fix the underlying problem. The problem is not that they are bad; they are not allowed to be any other way. They have been exposed to nothing but violence at home and at school and so know only violence. We tell them that we only validate them if they are violent. If they come from the bottom, whatever that means, the chances of them succeeding are slim unless, of course, they can beat the system at its own game.

So what we have in place is a system of violence, a political economy of violence where the poor people are given the scraps and told to be happy with what they have. They are pushed on to the worst land and expected to thrive. When they do in fact thrive, people are shocked. They are not taught how to fish, but only how to go to the shop and get fish. They are not provided with the tools and skills to succeed other than through the openings the system has allowed for them.

We are talking about a system that has been created to produce the current outcomes. So when we talk about Mrs Butler-Turner not winning because she is a woman, we are saying that the system will only elect men, no matter how bad they may be. We seem to be saying that this is the way the system works and we will accept it. Otherwise, what are the ways that we plan to change the system?

We argued that women deserve the same right to pass on their citizenship as men, however, that has been watered down by arguing that women are too easily swayed by foreign males and will sell their patrimony out to any man who comes around. Obviously, women are weaker than men and must be protected; they are emotional beings who cannot reason like men can.

They are hysterical and can only be subdued by a good, strong man. This is all language that has been used over the last year or so to put women in their proverbial place, much like those dangerous young, working-class males. We have, however, normalised this way of speaking and seeing women. This is what Jacqui True calls ‘the masculine protector and feminine-protected identities’ that do not serve us.

When we read beyond our shores, we may see that similar problems are arising outside, but we say that we do not want to be influenced by outsiders; we do not want them to determine our polices for national development, yet we bring them in and pay them millions of dollars a year to do exactly that. Notwithstanding the recommendations of the million-dollar consultants, we continue to ignore all the conventions and treaties we sign onto and all the changes to domestic laws we agree to make.

We may say that we want to change the way things are, but when it comes down to it, we can talk about it, and then simply turn over and go back to sleep as long as we are not losing any of our privilege.

What would actually change if a woman could seriously aspire to political leadership? We might have to make serious changes to a structure that promotes entrenched inequalities. We seem, however, to be happy with the arms of hyper-masculine flesh guiding the country along the road to serfdom.