The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Close ya legs! Stop layin down with man!

As a society, we have been charging that blacks overbreed, but it would be a more accurate statement to say that low-income and poorly educated groups are more likely to have more children than higher-income groups with a higher level education.

There are a number of threads that continually lead us back to this point:

In a family, as dysfunctional or as functional as many families are today, once a cycle begins, it continues for decades and/or generations.

For some reason that social workers should be aware of, when a mother has a child during adolescence the trend will probably be continued when this child is old enough to reproduce. So it goes.

In families with multiple ‘males producing children’, not fathers, there is a potential, unless there is serious intervention, for that trend to continue.

One way that trends are altered is through education. However, both boys and girls need to be educated. Further, with the failings of the education system in the country we must ask the question, if we know that more and better education reduces the incidences of teenage pregnancy and overbreeding, for example, would we not work to improve the system? Does this not also work against poverty?

Women’s ability to negotiate safe sex

It is ironic that men often blame women for their breeding and never look at how this happens. When we study HIV and other STIs as well as teen pregnancy and some social conditions and attitudes that lead to these, we find that while 51 per cent of the population may be female, women are not often in a position to demand safe sex. Unsafe sex, as they say, causes breeding. Socio-culturally, young men see it as ‘masculine’ to have unsafe sex with ‘de gyal’...‘She is only de gyal!’

It matters little how long the relationship will last or even if pregnancy results. In fact, we as Bahamians usually base men’s masculinity on the number of ‘chirren dey gat an’ de number a gyals dey grinin’.’

These are simple facts. So we define cultural relations based on seriously flawed social dynamics. If a woman demands the use of a condom, the man claims that she does not trust him, love him, or that she is cheating on him and deserves to be slapped.

In unequal relationships this kind of result is common. The young girl or young woman usually surrenders her body to this man because she ‘loves’ him or he holds more power than she does.

The huge number of incestuous relationships in the country are also based on power inequities, where girls are ‘interfered’ with by older males in the family and they certainly cannot demand safe sex. We also choose to ignore and deny the issuance from these interactions.

We know that many uncles, cousins, grandfathers, visiting partners ‘breeds dese gyals’ and yet we choose to blame the women!

Power inequalities within relations and relationships are a serious problem and result in a great many rapes and sometimes murders. A man assumes control in a relationship because he earns more than a woman or is seen as having more currency, and so the woman, as stated above, cannot demand safe sex, or even when she wishes to have sex.

According to some branches of the church, once a man marries a woman, she belongs to him; he owns her. Yet we blame her. The great paradox of this seems to be lost on many of those who claim to understand the workings of Bahamian society and culture. The statistics speak loudly, if we choose to listen.

Structural and cultural violence

We tell poor people that they are poor because they make themselves poor. They must work harder! If they want to be rich, even without the requisite education to be able to read and write and think, we say they can be rich.

This is systemic and structural failure. We are ignoring what is really making people, especially women, poor in our society. Moreover, this goes beyond cash richness and into real wealth generation.

How many people who are condemned for their breeding are in a position to generate real wealth? How many of them are stuck in a transactional relationship spiral?

We are in an interesting position where, much as happens with rape, we are blaming the victim.

Usually when women are raped the police and the courts blame them for their attack because they are meant to walk around in sack cloths that cover them from head to toe as men are not required to control themselves. Men can inflict horrible violence on women and it be blamed on women – ‘She provoked him’.

This kind of understanding promotes and justifies violence; it condones male-privileged behaviour, as much as slave masters were justified in raping their slave women because they owned those women.

This kind of violence becomes cultural, where we assume that all black women are such and such a way and can be treated in such and such a way because they deserve it. Their exploitation is justifiable because they caused it. Further, the violence of government and those in power who declare such things and the blind policies implemented to ‘control’ promiscuity that is ironically socially validated, are more damaging to the society than no policies at all.

Historical implications

In the 1930s, given serious social problems in the then-colonies, a commission was established to assess the situation and to make recommendations for how to improve the lives of the blacks in the Caribbean and to avoid further unrest.

The report submitted by this commission became known as The Moyne Report and it tackles the serious plaguing problems that spark unrest. The Commission stated that the demand for constitutional reform was “sufficiently widespread to make it doubtful whether any scheme of social reform, however wisely conceived or efficiently conducted, would be completely successful unless they are accompanied by the largest measure of constitutional development which is thought to be judicious in the circumstances.”

Obviously, this has remained unaddressed. We claim that the people have spoken and that they choose not to have legal equality between men and women. Yet when on other occasions the people chose one way and government chose to ignore their expression and do the opposite, the need for reform almost over half a century later remains a key factor. Women are still treated as second-class citizens because they are legally second-class citizens.

The report offers that there is a lack of family life.

It reports bluntly: “This lack of family life has a bearing on every aspect of social conditions in the West Indies and its effects from a health standpoint are particularly serious...The effect of existing conditions on the welfare and wellbeing of children is particularly marked.”

Given this historical reality it is odd that members of the ‘high public’ would see it so important to highlight a point that has remained unaddressed and of enormous historical importance to the entire Caribbean, of which the Bahamas is a part, for over a century.

These speakers also see it as essential to lay blame at the feet of the very women who are the victims of a highly unequal and historically-imposed, racially and sexually-biased system.

It seems odd that so many people are so quick to tell women that they need to stop opening their legs to men, stop making the country poor, with full knowledge that this is a systemic problem that has existed for centuries and results in part from serious, utterly entrenched and undermining inequalities and generational poverty.