The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Over the last week we have been assaulted by violence. Politicians have taken the time to comment on the declining crime rate and to berate the public for talking about records in the number of people who have been murdered this year.

They seem ill prepared to stop and look at their role in furthering the violent trend. As far as they are concerned, much like the former colonial lords, they are kings of their fiefdoms; far be it from any underling to challenge their superiority.

Underlings come in all sizes, shapes, sexes and colours, but the most underling of the underlings are, according to their blatant if not flagrant disregard for gender equality or humanity, women – especially young women and young working-class black males.

Interestingly enough, the language used by the same people who claim to have these people’s best interests at heart is divisive at best, and colonially racist and bigoted at worst. Their masculine or patriarchal, paternalist superiority is beyond reproach.

The talking heads constantly complain about the dangerous element in society and the need to be tough on crime. Perhaps we need to ask, what is crime?

There seems to be a tacit understanding that crime is only crime when it includes murder of someone who can ill afford to defend themselves. Crime does not include embezzlement, gender-based violence, land theft, misrepresentation.

The power imbalance becomes clear. Firstly, we cannot or dare not talk about murder when a youth has lost his or her life in questionable circumstances in dubious situation where the power relationships obviously imply that someone is buying something from someone else. We can, though, talk about murder and gratuitous violence when one ‘thug’ shoots another black youth in the street, or when an ‘innocent’ person is gunned down in some awful way.

Secondly, when a married woman is sexually assaulted by her husband, this is not violence. This is especially so when they are both consenting adults who belong to the church. He, through virtue of marriage, has acquired the right to do as he wishes with her body and soul. She must obey him, according to those who say that Bahamian women are vindictive and will use any equality to undo their innocent husbands. There is no power differential here, however. The husband’s word is simply the beginning, the middle and the end of the story. Who would listen to a wife’s ‘story’ over a husband’s facts?

Authority is vested in the man, especially if he is of a certain class, slightly educated, earns enough money to use his power to buy others, and can speak eloquently about the ills of the country in a dangerous time. The ills are not shortcomings of the patriarchal leadership, but rather of those lowly subjects bristling against exploitation, exclusion, disaffection and violent social marginalisation.

We totally get that most black men are criminals in the United States, at least according to the police who shoot them dead in the streets, even when they are eight, nine, 11, 15-year-old unarmed black males. Their crime is that they are male, working class, we assume, and black. That in itself is a threat! We must shoot them to save ourselves.

How then does the same discourse find its way into a small paradise of postcolonial pleasure – as long as you are from somewhere else? How then is it that those same youth are given no chances outside of under-education, often violent home lives, no opportunity to learn the skill of de-escalating conflict through reasonable discussion or simply walking away (They cannot read, write or count because 50 per cent of them will not graduate as school has failed them, but it is all their fault).

They inhabit a world of you step on my shoe, I got to kill you dead. Presumed ‘disrespect’ is akin to intentional destruction, perhaps worse. Defamation of character is less significant because people who speak like that usually have the wherewithal to pull lawyers out of their pockets and defend themselves. People who do not have such language,have no such luck. The level of education many young people leave the public system with does not provide for such luck, unless s/he is form an engaged family or is a self-starter and can resist the peer-pressure of simply being in the public system; a system where education is seen as ‘sissifying’ for boys.

Yet we treat them like dogs and never ask what went wrong. We encourage the exploitation of young women because they will sell themselves for a chicken snack. We argue that all these troublemakers need to be hanged by the neck until dead, and it would be even better if we could do it in Rawson Square for all to see. We want to get away from the Privy Council because they won’t allow hanging anymore. At the same time, do we stop to ask why this is happening? Why are these youngsters who are usually too young to understand the real consequences of their actions, the true impact of their words, the painful reality of poverty, acting out what they see at home and in public?

Their lives revolve around a dream that you have sold them, but then taken away from them. They thought at one time that they could be someone, but the state made sure to distance them from that reality by reminding them of who they were and where they came from. One young youth man from Kemp Road stands little chance of leaving Kemp Road if he cannot pull himself up by his bootstraps. Yet he has no bootstraps because they have been cut off by a system of under-performance and inequality, but they still vote and their votes continue to enshrine their inequality.

We often say how evil young people are, how inferior women are, how wanton young girls are – have we ever stopped to ask how they got like this?

After we asked that question, have we paused to ponder what needs to be done to change this? How can we talk to these people? How can we hear their stories and work with them, change their perceptions of being disregarded and disrespected by a society that is quick to throw them out?

When we stop and listen to their voices, the stories they tell are of exploitation, social exclusion and disaffection because the schools they go to teach them that they are worth nothing. The lives they live make them understand that there are no other options than crime. Have we stopped to think, honourable members, that the examples set in the honourable house of lying, cheating stealing and bullying set standards that cause repercussions far and wide?

We insist that women are worth less than men, that young black boys are all criminals and must beg at lights or in supermarket car parks.

The absolute poverty line is now $11.64 per person per day, which translates into an annual poverty line of $4,247. This is the amount an individual needs to meet his/her basic necessities, which are a combination of the minimum expenditure needed for a nutritionally adequate diet as well as the amount needed for basic non-food necessities.

Some 12.8 per cent of the population, approximately 43,000 persons, do not meet this minimum requirement of $4,247 and are therefore living in poverty, yet no one can live on that. As one lecturer at COB points out from studies conducted by students, “this is the shopping list according to which you can have a balanced diet in the 242 on $3.82 a day (pre-VAT)”.

This is particularly a problem for women who earn less than men because of they are female. It is also a problem for all young people in the 242. As that research from the College of the Bahamas, soon to be University of the Bahamas, indicates, people can barely afford to eat a loaf of bread, a package of bologna and a pint of milk a week, yet we say that they are not under the poverty line. People cannot afford to live in dignity. but that matters little as long as the status quo is maintained and those in charge lose none of their hard-earned privileges.

Ironically, by creating a more equitable society, we win all around, and crime, as research from around the world indicates, goes down. Can we stop and think about that before we blame then next young, black boy or girl for being naturally inferior and unwilling to work and so liable to be incarcerated in the new seven-storied Fox Hill hotel because the educational system they find themselves in strips their humanity from them and treats them as if they are less than from the time they enter it. Their lack of regard for anything comes from somewhere and it is not written in a book.