The Tribune

By IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

In the Interamerican Bank’s Quarterly Bulletin “Crime in Paradise”, released this year, we in the Bahamas rank as one of the most violently criminal in the world and extremely high levels of the fear that evokes.

To quote directly from the report: “In fact, the rate of victimisation by assault and threats in the Caribbean is significantly higher than in any other world region in the ICVS database (including seven cities in Latin America: 4.7 per cent and 10 African cities: 5.2 per cent).”

The Bahamas, New Providence, and Jamaica, Kingston, rank highest for assault of the threat of assault. To be even more damning of the way we live now, the report offers: “Assaults were far more likely to be committed by someone the victim knew (73 per cent).”

In a revelatory discussion recently, the problem of a high incidence of gender-based violence become even more palpable. In a class of one boy and 24 girls, approximately half the girls knew someone of their age who was in an abusive relationship. This kind of behaviour is expected and condoned. In fact, when the results of the COB Crisis Centre study are compared to this, the reality is that we have created a pattern of violence in our society. Many young women, as stated in an earlier article, felt that gender-based violence was normal because that was what they saw in their homes. Further, they were inculcated into “loving relationships” with boys who felt that they had the right to lay hands on their girlfriends if they were unhappy with them, and girls interpreted this as being a sign of their boyfriend’s love for them.

Older women perpetuate this way of thinking. In fact, many young women are “trained up” in their submissive relations with men through their home lives and especially through their mothers. This is especially alarming when we consider that the majority of them would be the issue of single mother headed homes. They would live in one or two rooms where their mothers have visiting men who they rely on to keep the family housed, fed and clothed. At the same time, as the preponderance of mothers with young children at traffic lights, malls, banks, cash machines and the like demonstrates, they teach their children to beg. They create dependency on someone else for their living and understanding that this is normal and that they should be paid or provided for. This provides two levels of violence in one: they teach submission and they teach dependence.

With the highest incidence of rape and gender-based violence in the region, the highest murder rate to go with those and an alarming rate of inequality, the Bahamas features high on the IDB’s Report on Crime. But what is interesting is that the report obviously agrees with the research that the Crisis Centre and COB partnered in producing. Moreover, the statistics lead us to understand from other studies that Bahamians’ reliance on violence to keep children in check results in some serious social problems. By beating our children down, as so many parents do, we are making them perform worse in the long run. This kind of insane violence, because it is not simply a smack from time to time, but it is slaps, punches and pinches because “they too damn rude”, not to mention the ubiquitous verbal violence and abuse, leads the country further into the mess of violence that is so horribly controlling our lives currently.

When there are so few generational differences, something is obviously wrong. When young women believe that young men love them because they abuse them, we know there is a serious social and psychosocial problem.

When, according to the IDB Report, 37.2 per cent of a society believes in or understands that a wife should be beaten if she is unfaithful, there may be some alarm bells. However, there are none sounding except in the minds of those who work to mitigate against violence.

More significantly though, is the cultural thinking that women are inferior to men and as such should be disciplined like children, “because they know not what they do”, and there are far too many women and a dray load of prominent men who believe that women should be beaten and even that women, once married to men, cannot be raped because they become the chattel of their man. We inhabit a country where over 76 per cent of the population believes in beating the “devil” out of their children, and if we follow this line of thinking logically, which is not something as a nation that is popular, their women.

However, we should be proud. We may have not beaten out other countries for the worst economic outcome, though our unemployment levels are higher than reported and maintaining, and the government is taxing the pee out of the citizenry, and lending it up to still 60 per cent debt to GDP ratio, as well as promoting violence through their example spoken and unspoken, but we are featured thus: “Some countries in the region are characterised by particularly high levels of violence, especially homicides and assault. This is true for Jamaica, the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.”

Oh, the shame that we should feel, but apparently do not as we embrace violence and promote violent exchanges between persons because that is man talk. We are producing the violence we see around us. Politicians and leaders are stealing their followers blind, but that’s OK because they are too blind to see the theft or are okay with it because they like the roughness of the speaker. In a sad reality, the Bahamas has perhaps the highest level of violence in the region, and as the IDB report states: “There is strong evidence that violence is learned in the home when children experience violence. In the Bahamas, one in five (22.7 per cent) adults approves of, or understands, a man beating his wife if she neglects household chores.”

Why would anyone beat another adult for neglecting to perform household chores? Did slavery end? Did black people become emancipated from mental slavery? In order to escape violence and slavery, we can stop teaching our children to be violently enslaved and to violently enslave others.