The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethel-Bennett

For the past few weeks this column has dedicated a great deal of focus to gangs and gang violence because it is such a serious national and international problem.

After having researched this area for the last 10 years, I found there seems to be little progress made, especially in the Caribbean, because of the refusal to change the way we address situations of insecurity and the steadfast ways in which we operate on a cultural level.

Men must be tough, hard and violent, unable to express any manner of kindness or warmth, and women are expected to be soft and nurturing (but it doesn’t mean they don’t participate in gangs (as long as we have dysfunctional families all persons can look to gangs for identification).

Boys and men cannot be nurturing, according to Bahamian cultural politics. These are seriously damaging ideas that have been brought over from slavery, colonialism and disenfranchisement through nationalism and Majority Rule.

Ironically, the same talk about young, poor, black males being dangerous and a threat to the nation has been adopted by the ruling classes, notwithstanding its old colonial legacy.

We so often hear talking heads discussing the need to be Christian and the need to bring men into education. But neither of these is an answer when education is nationally seen as unimportant, especially for young men.

Studies upon studies have demonstrated that Bahamians do not invest in educating their boys, especially if they are working class. However, they will educate their daughters. Education is seen as feminising and not necessary for a man who can succeed without it, but this is proving to be nationally devastating. It is not a problem of the Ministry of Education alone, but a national, socio-cultural problem. At the same time, we tell boys that they must be tough and violent, yet we somehow expect them to be this when only when we want them to, never mind that we do not teach them when it is important to be peaceful.

“Ya gyal cheat on ya, beat she

Ya boy talk bad to ya, beat he

Ya mudder shout at you, hate woman

Ya fadder is a no good

What you is?”

Spare the rod

We so often hear this adage attributed to the Bible as sound advice for rearing children.

Only, this is not about beating children with bats, electrical wire, 2x4s; this is about discipline. We have inherited this gusto for whipping from slavery and it is a cultural trait that has produced a great deal of psychological damage and trauma, but the usual argument is, “I survived”.

But how badly do you beat your children? When we beat, whip and thrash our children until they are black, blue and bleeding, we are not disciplining them but destroying their souls.

If we look back at slavery we see this was done to slaves to break them. Why do we want to break our children? Our job as parents is to build them up, not pull them down. The rod is not a branch or a nasty tongue steeped in vinegar and lye. It is in fact structure that many of us lack because so many of the younger generation have ADHD and ADD because of all the trauma, hatred, social violence and bad diets. You cannot behave well if you are so strung out on sugar you can’t keep still and will crash within two hours of getting to school in the morning. It is not coincidental that resource-poor children have poor diets and do worse at school, unless their parents are conscientious and do their best to provide them with real food, not chips and soda for breakfast. This is the food of failures!

Structural violence

Sending children to crumbling schools is violence. Sending children to schools where teachers cannot teach, do not like children, and beat the heavens out of them, is violence. Sending children to schools where gangs are actively participating in the daily life, is violence. Sending children to schools where there is no electricity, no running water, mould, no supplies except for what the teachers must bring, is violence.

We send them there because we expect them to fail. By sending them to these schools we expect them to succumb to being told they are dumb, stupid, ignorant, criminals. They learn well from what they are told and taught they are. This may be a holdover from slavery and colonialism, but it is not natural nor is it necessary.

Structural violence is when we graduate students who cannot read, or promote them to the next grade without any of the skills they need, or should have acquired in the grades before. We set them up to fail. Studies show that the more we expect failure, the more we teach them to fail, the more they will fail.

Yet we expect them to be something different from a failure, even though everything around them says ‘fail’.

Structural violence is when we arrest young, black men because they are young and black and they should not be anywhere where they are not welcome.

They should not be in groups in the streets. They should not walk on Bay Street or Shirley Street in groups. The law allows us to detain them for days without charging them. And the violence that occurs while they are detained? And the failure that results when this is put on their record? And the impact this has on the cultural structure of the nation?

Gang violence is violence on steroids only if we think that beating a woman is any different form beating another man. Gang violence is the result of telling people they do not belong, picking them up, deporting them to a country they have never been to, or telling them that they cannot attend school, seek healthcare, learn to read, have a home that is not in a shanty town.

Gang violence is only different from killing someone because you don’t know how to communicate with him because you failed in seventh grade, and because we say it’s different.

The church cannot save the family that does not exist. The Christian faith cannot save the person who is being beaten to a pulp by a group of people and must protect him or herself by joining a group that will help keep him or her alive.

The community that has fallen apart and is too busy making money to buy ‘tings’ can’t do anything to stop gang violence. This is where the gang comes from.

Cultural violence

Cultural violence is justified by structural violence that has erased the person and made them a cog. We treat these young people as if they do not matter and then we expect the to behave differently.

We have boys who will rape girls only because they have seen this in their homes with parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts. We tell them that is what men do. We have boys who cannot speak, cannot read, cannot problem solve, but we expect them to do other than succumb to peer pressure. How?

Gangs are real. They are an international, transnational, national, local and unfortunately part of the inequality and disparity that comes with this model of development where leaders see themselves as better than the people they claim to identify with. Gangs are here, and violence is here, so how do we move past these without forgetting or denying them? We need a total change in programming.