The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

As a culture and a country we have come to a place where we boast about how much we can beat people. We especially like beating children – “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

We wear badges of beating that seem to say I beat my children daily. We have no problem beating, really beating them in a way that can leave them hurt, bleeding or simply incredibly scarred.

Just the level of talk can be a violent attack that destroys any self-esteem. We live in homes that are so combative, hostile and destructive that nothing can emerge from them expect persons who see violence as the only way to treat others.

Girls who are brought up in homes like this are usually conditioned to look for larger-than-life partners with whom they have extremely violent relationships of control and codependence.

Studies continually underscore the trend that when we produce children in homes where abuse is present, they will usually grow up to be abusive or abused. Yet we continue to boast about violence. Nationally, we are proud of our violence. Even when government condemns violence at every turn, what they actually demonstrate undoes all their talk of getting tough on crime and violence.

Culturally, we talk about beating women with whom we are in romantic relationships as if it were a sport. We laugh about it as if it were a joke. We throw it around as if it were a volleyball.

Somehow, the Manichaean nature of our public figures is so often revealed, but nothing is ever done. A man can laugh in public about beating women, which is a crime as far as we are told, yet nothing happens to him. In fact, his colleagues laugh and support him. So when those same colleagues leave that public space and go back to their jobs, what do we think about them?

Is violence against women really wrong? Are they serious about this? Do they believe that beating women is a crime or that it is simply a laughing matter that can break the ice?

When we boast about killing someone or raping someone or shooting someone, are these crimes? When we go on record as saying that we have done these things, is it not the job of the authorities to investigate and bring charges? This would be the logical conclusion if the person were not a leader.

Does the church condone violence or is this simply a figment of the imagination? Does the state promote violence or this just an illusion of foot-in-mouth syndrome that has proven to be true, but no one takes it seriously?

If these public figures were someone else, the allegations would be taken more seriously. Though the law rarely takes domestic violence seriously. Some members of the church leadership and senior community will encourage women to stay in marriages with men who are beating them three square or round times a day. And when they are not beating them, they are saying that they love them. Or when they are not home, they are out tramping around and bringing home all the prizes that go with indiscriminate sexual behaviour, but they are never charged with anything.

When we talk about violence against women and domestic violence, on the one hand as being national problems, and at the same time boast about them, we see that the laughter underscores an absolute disregard for law, order and humanity. The jokes resonate more with the public than the discussion to end gender-based violence and violence against women. At the end of the day, the same state that claims to be tough on crime is promoting an idea that crime is not bad; some crimes are okay. In fact, we will celebrate culprits who beat women or rape girls, these things are a part of a culture of acceptable masculinity.

'#Nasty Woman'

As the world shifts towards increasing religious fundamentalisms and powerful private investors owning entire communities, women are pushed increasingly into the margins. What we are witnessing with these strong rich, influential and often corrupt men who claim to be victims of unfair systemic abuse and defamation of very gentle and honourable characters is that they are tyrants. The men who do this are usually abusive men who make people love them through control and coercion. In an alarmingly troubling article on The Huffington Post with the headline “Donald Trump, the Greatest Victim in the History of the World”, Ann Jones describes the history behind this kind of thinking and draws parallels between a convicted abuser and killer and the intrigue with the current Republican candidate for US president:

“Joel Steinberg stalked a far tinier stage than Donald Trump and he did more deadly damage, but the two men seem to be brothers under the skin, sharing common character defects well described in psychiatric texts: extreme narcissism, a taste for sexual predation, and very similar views of the women on whom they prey. Like Steinberg, who was incapable of seeing himself as the judge accurately described him, Trump seems blind to the real nature of his own behavior. (His current wife describes him as a “boy.”) Neither man seems capable of taking responsibility for the harm he’s done, and when their own actions finally call down retribution, branding them as losers ― ah, then come the conspiracy theories and the vindictive wail of the victim.”

What Jones underscores other researchers and many studies have maintained for years: when a woman is abused by a man, women are the first to condemn her. She caused it! He is the victim.

Accordingly, many victims of violence, are dismissed as provoking the men in their lives. Apparently, Trump’s ex-wife was abused, according to court files. However, women, according to Trump, and as Jones illustrates, are only worthy of derision and denigration as are any men who happen to oppose them. As a nation, the Bahamas is joining a truly motley crew of Manichaean leaders and stars who use their considerable power and influence to disempower others, especially women and children. It is a commonly known fact that men who abuse women, as we can see locally, also abuse their children.

They create young men who, from direct experience, become perpetrators of violence. They create a wider impact by modeling predatory and illegal behaviour for all their young and impressionable followers to adapt. This kind of influence can destroy entire communities.

It is ironic (or perhaps not) that educated, intelligent, well-off, outspoken professional women often undermine the gains other women have made in all fields, especially in legal rights and social empowerment. Feminism, they often argue, is an imported evil that destroys the Christian fibre of our community. In the final analysis, they will not support other women, opting instead to empower predators, perpetrators of violence against women in particular, to the ranks of leadership.

We see well-dressed, well-spoken bullies who are known to have seriously harmed women and we raise them up on a pedestal. Tragically, this kind of narcissism and self-absorption is poison for communities.

As Jones states: “About one in three American women are survivors of some version of such treatment, euphemistically called ‘domestic abuse’. That’s roughly 65 million women voters who, as I wrote last June, ‘know a tyrant when they see one.’ How many women in this country share this reality?”

Abuse of power and the (mis)use of the state

Since the 1900s the examples of dictators, leaders and stars have become commonly identified with misusing their position to behave immorally and illegally but not to get caught. As Jones points out: “On this, he couldn’t have been clearer in boasting of his pussy-grabbing skills on that Hollywood Access tape: ‘When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything’.”

As our leaders take on the dubious role of predators because mothers throw their daughters at them, girls throw themselves at them, and some women see transactional sex as the best way to survive a rapidly deteriorating economy these men cannot refuse the allure of power over people. They use this bullying and coercion to rule a community as much as a home.

The damage we are seeing when leaders rise in public places and boast about slapping down women is no comparison to the kind of national implosion that lies ahead. Men who do this and women who empower them seem oblivious to the reality that this will happen to their daughters, granddaughters, nieces, sons, cousins; abuse does not only happen to someone else. How can we manage the kind of devastation lying predators and perpetrators of violence against women have on the nation and then claim to be the victims?

• bethellbennett@gmail.com