The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

Blue waters, pristine beaches, wonderful hotels and violence is the image of the Bahamas splattered across many tabloids, and the warnings issued by nations to protect their citizens from falling victim to the violence resident in the Bahamas.

This is the only time Bahamians seem to complain about the international press, yet we know this is true. We say that we feel unsafe in our island home, but we expect tourists to continue to travel here and pay large sums of money to enjoy paradise. Unfortunately, that paradise is out of bounds to many residents. At the same time, the press and government continue to talk about the level of violence in our young people. Where are the options?

We have created a culture of violence that pervades many layers of Bahamian society, yet we see it as normal.

This article builds on last week’s piece, “Criminals”, and tries to show how gender-based violence, domestic violence and sexual violence become normalised through this cultural violence and a culture of violence. These are two different and distinct things, but we assume that the second is normal and the first is out of place.

One of the fundamental links that we need to look at is the intergenerational continuation of violence. Many families breed violence in their homes because of the level of anger and frustration they share with their children. In a country where 50 per cent of homes are headed by single mothers who earn less than men, although they may be as qualified, and where more than half of young men do not graduate from school and so are unable to support the kind of life they are told they should expect, men are often seen as vagabonds and no good louts. These same sentiments are shared with the children who may look like their fathers.

Mothers inflict a level of violence on their children through the hatred they have for the men with whom they chose to have children. Yet they do not understand how the culture can have become so violent.

We teach young boys that it is normal to be violent towards girls and we teach young girls that you should expect boys to be violent towards them. We do not allow women to choose, but we tell them they have a choice.

We also create young men who cannot really choose unless they have had exceptional parenting that has given them love instead of heaped abuse on them. This is cultural violence. We also teach boys that it is normal and good that they dominate women: women must submit to their husbands. A culture that legitimates exploitation is based around cultural violence. Research shows us that.

The study of cultural violence highlights the way in which the act of direct violence and the fact of structural violence are legitimised and thus rendered acceptable in society. One way cultural violence works is by changing the moral colour of an act from red/wrong to green/right or at least to yellow/acceptable; an example being “murder on behalf of the country as right, on behalf of oneself wrong”. Another way is by making reality opaque so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent. (Johan Gultang 1990, p 292)

Rape is a form of violence that has been changed from morally unacceptable to being less wrong; it is only about a man insisting that he gets what he wants. Rape is forcing a woman to submit to a man. It is not about sex. It is about power. As Gultang argues, the use of power is legitimised by the state and its authority becomes unquestionable.

He states: “By ‘cultural violence’ we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimise direct or structural violence.

We often see violence being legitimised by some branches of the church, especially with holy wars. It is also the case that we legitimise the exploitation of a group of people, for example, through creating inequalities among peoples and espousing hatred, and we legitimise violence.

We can argue that women are worth less than men unless they behave more like men, but when they do this they are castigated by society for being unfeminine. If a woman is very successful in her career, she is seen as being too masculine. If she is too political, she is also seen as venturing into a man’s world: politics equal male and so her active participation in politics is masculine, unfeminine. (Ironically, we do not see the double standard we create in this small country where there are more women supporting families). However, these women must know their place and behave accordingly. This is especially so in the private sphere, although women often run their homes, it is seen as normal that men are heads of households and if they choose to discipline their wives, they have that right. A study by the Crisis Centre and the College of the Bahamas demonstrated this beyond a doubt. Yet we seem content with the status quo. This spills over into the public sphere in very interesting ways and is taken up by the state as a danger against the state. This danger is expressed on a number of levels and through a number of ways:

• Young girls should expect to be violated by men

• Young boys are expected to violate young women

• Men must dominate women

• Women must submit to men

• The state has the authority to use violence

• We expect rich people to use their power to exploit

• Poor people are bad people

• Poor people are criminals

As so many people argue, poverty is a state of mind that causes crime to develop. However, when we insist on “ghettoising” people and that all the folks who come from a particular area are violent and criminal or poor and unclean, much like black youth in the US, we make them thus. Bell hooks and other black US-based scholars work with these structures, and they also show that when black youth resist becoming what they are told they are, they fall victim to becoming another aspect of the socio-cultural stereotype that binds people into strict ways of being.

We refuse to allow them any other way of being. We have established that this is their culture and it justifies using violence to control them. However, those persons in authority can justifiably use these same mechanisms to exact their desires, but they are not seen as violent. Violence is saved for those who may not be able to afford to defend themselves.

In colonial societies, like the United States and other states built on the imperial/colonial model where there is a group of people who have authority and are right,and a group of people who are disempowered and are wrong, these discontinuities arise.

Yet we do not challenge that the culture is violent or that we have used cultural violence to create a culture of violence: a culture where young, less well-off, darker-skinned persons are forced into the social margins, but are used to create the wealth of the nation. They are the labour, except when there is surplus of youth, then the state has the right to control their existence and their ability to express themselves. It justifies its exploitation of them, while taking away their access to human rights and a supportive environment (one of the factors high on the index of quality of life). When 7,000 homes are without power because they cannot afford to pay for it, and perhaps the same number are without running water, we have a serious problem.

When homes function on the structure of violence, and the violence when it comes from the top is normal, justifiable and accepted, or legitimate, but the violence when it comes from those who are being oppressed is not, there is a serious social problem.

To borrow some words from the OSAC 2016 report on the Bahamas: “As a result of this trend, on January 6, 2016, Embassy Nassau put the use of jet-skis operated by local nationals in New Providence off-limits to all Chief of Mission personnel/agencies domiciled in the Bahamas.”

Cultural violence has been used to create a culture of violence that makes young men into sexual predators and their partners into victims of sexual violence because of the relationships they experience at home and the behaviour of the state towards them.

When colonial overlords were paying themselves in parcels, acres, masses of land for their work in government, the country was already rigged against the same people who are today less able to survive because they cannot live in the same way they are told they must live. They are told they must have a new car, a nice house, jewellery and other accessories, but they are not able to access that kind of life because they are not given the tools to enter those areas legally. In fact, the land is already owned, the banks do not lend to them money for houses; they do lend for new cars – at premium rates that create unsustainable debt. They cannot get “good jobs” because their education has not prepared them for such. Their home lives have created people who see violence and the use of violence to survive as necessary and normal; so they are just outside the gates.

Sadly we are perpetuating our own culture of violence as we legitimise domination and exploitation as normal ways of life, but expect those less fortunate to live exemplary lives notwithstanding the walls built against them.

• bethellbennett@gmail.com