The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett

VIOLENCE, crime and senseless anger – are these the problems of a happy island spanning 21 miles from east to west and seven miles from south to north?

How can it be that such a small island can face so many apparently insurmountable crime issues?

How can it be that police are unable to stem the tide of violent crimes? How can it be that a political promise to put down the crime numbers has only led to a massive spike in crime?

How can it be that promises to promote equality have only caused greater inequality?

Inequality is a serious problem. No government so far has really addressed the structural problems with inequality in the Bahamas.

We talk about empowering women, we talking about working for the poor. We talk about projects like Urban Renewal, but where is the real structural change?

The answers all are wrapped up in VAT.

VAT is the new panacea for all the wrongs in the country, along with a heavy-handed police presence. We talk a bout a referendum to bring women’s rights in line with men’s rights, but as soon as we get too close, the scenes from the wild, wild west increase and the guns start blazing, the lone political rangers start talking from the bottom and shooting from the hip, because as we all know, it’s all about ruining the country.

It’s all about doing away with our Christian fundamentals; it’s all about gay marriage. Yet, no one really addresses what is really at stake. We signed on to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, now passed due and there’s no view to us even remotely addressing most of them. We also agreed to many other treaties that would make our islands better places to be women and poor, but the noise on Potter’s Cay makes it impossible to see the conch for the slop. In the meantime, the slop is slowly rotting and we simply descend further into the contaminated waters of sewage. Actually, the spiral has been quick, fast, furious and angry.

We cannot talk about allowing women to be equal in the country without some members of the Christian community condemning that as creating a new Sodom and Gomorra. They are happy with the way things are; don’t mess with their bread and butter.

By creating some kind of social equality, things might improve. There may be fewer rapes and domestic attacks. We may get closer to empowering women, and thereby also empowering men. Young males are one of the most disaffected groups in the nation. When I talk about young males, I always talk about young, black males. People then say, but this is a black country and surely there are no racial under or overtones. In fact, there are racial over and undertones; the poorer one is the blacker one becomes. The poor boy from Step Street or Nassau Village or even Kemp Road is going to shoot because he does not have a damn thing to lose.

We have so utterly excluded them from ‘our’ society that they do not care what happens. They may have a stab at being a strong man for a day, at the end of that day, they will be dead, or in prison—so what?! That is their life cycle.

We have socially excluded poor youth, especially males, through our social programming and our cultural performance of masculinity to such an extent that we should probably pat ourselves on the back. We have taught them that they are not welcome in this world, we have drilled it into their ‘hard heads’, we pick them up in police cruisers, we put them in prison, they meet tough criminals and come out worse than they were.

All they have access to after that, unless some good soul picks them up, is the life of crime.

They can make more in a day through one drug deal than they can in a year through honest-low-paid work (and we tell them that the $$$ they have in their pockets are more important than what they do or how they get them).

We do not expect anything else from them. When they leave school without the benefit of a sheet of paper that says they left and are prepared to do anything, they might as well stand on the side of the road and beg, which is exactly what they do. Their begging, though, is met by a man who is happy to give them a gun to protect his turf and then pay them handsomely for it.

They get recognition. They go from being a no man, a nobody, to being a big man in the town. They have women after them – even though they know exactly how they got their money; they have the respect of their peers; they also have the respect of all the younger boys.

When they get shot in some drive-by retaliation shooting, after beating a few women, killing a number of other ‘fellas’, stealing someone’s drugs, kicking down the door to someone’s house, raping a few women who could not report it for fear, when they die, they become heroes beyond measure.

Those same poor, black youth have a desire to be someone. Poverty means that society turns a blind eye to them. We are tragically blind to how huge a part we play in the creation of the criminal underclass that we live in fear of.

It’s amazing that blackness is directly related to poverty, the poorer one is the ‘blacker’ one becomes, and to be a poor black male is utterly the worst place to be in this society.

We condemn males, unless they are wealthy, because they are bad, yet we teach them everything about being bad. They will have to live by another ethic.

They then live by the philosophy of ‘mine is today, whatever happens tomorrow, I am good today. I do not have tomorrow put down’.

In their world, in our world, the promise that tomorrow is not promised is real. They can simply walk out of their bedroom into their bathroom and meet a bullet because they killed someone’s boy form the next neighbourhood or they raped someone’s sister. Sexual violence is not about sex, it is about power. Murder is not about real hatred, it is about power.

The Brazilian favela film “City of God” encapsulates what we are becoming.

The tragedy of all of this is that we are creating the problem. The criminals have no fear because they have nothing to lose.

The officials and the criminals grew up together. Inequality and state-sanctioned violence only worsen the level of violence in the communities in which we live. Our small, Christian country is one of the most bigoted, unequal places, yet pretends to be all embracing and human. How do we get out of this mess? As everyone is now saying, ‘Wait until VAT really hits!’

While government thinks that it will raise money through VAT, it runs the serious risk of making the poor poorer, destroying the middle class, creating more crime and violence, increasing the inequalities that drive violence and crime and pushing those who produce in the country to leave. Then where will we be?