The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Violence is used to silence. Silence is death. Silence is violence. Silence not only destroys any social harmony that could develop between communities, it also destroys the communities and those within them. Silence is not golden!

Bahamians teach our children that to be seen and not heard is godly. However, this is doing violence to our children and to our nation. We tell girls to speak out when a man rapes you. That is his right. Incest and sexual violence within the family are silenced. We have come to a place where the voicelessness of the people is so complete that we can hardly survive in what has become a state that condones violence against anyone who it does not see as equal.

Violence comes in many and varied ways, and it is not limited to the physical manifestation of violence, punches, slaps, kicks, stabs, jooks. It is also the mental, emotional, financial and legal exploitation of a people or group of people. We control young, poor, black men through closing off avenues to their success through making classes uncomfortable for them, to making jobs out of their reach, by insisting that they are too dumb, too limited, too violent, and too stupid to amount to much more than a gangster. We did and do that daily. They learn it well. The kind of violence we discuss today is slightly different. Today we discuss how government empowers violence through privatising rape and sexual violence.

Rape is violence. Sexual violence is also obviously violence. Domestic violence is a harsh and cruel and tacitly state-sanctioned form of violence. Violence against women is also culturally sanctioned. Rape though is particularly destructive because its very aim is to destroy to reduce a soul to a position of inferiority. Why do we think it is OK to condone violence against women but to condemn violence against men? We condemn gang violence, but rape is a private matter.

In many communities, as is common in the Bahamas, women are more often than not controlled through violence. They are slapped because they, like children, need to be disciplined. They are not given money because they need to know their place. They are paid less because, according to certain aspects of society, they are worthless.

To combat such forms of violence, we establish legal and social mechanisms that can assist in keeping people, especially women and children, safe. When, however, a member of government states on the record that rape is a private matter, that member has either not thought before the words cascaded out of an unaware mouth, or thought that everyone was of the same opinion. The job of a department or ministry of social services is to help people and it is to create safe spaces for those who are usually most vulnerable, namely women and children. In this case, the minster has not done the job mandated.

Marital rape, similar to any other kind of rape, is still rape and rape is violence against a woman or man who is forced to have sexual relations against her or his will. Rape is not about sex, but about power. It is about sexually deviation in some cases, but also about the sociological damages in a community that allow us to reduce one person to less than we are.

In the Bahamas there is a huge occurrence of sexual violence. In conducting research on the transmission of AIDS, it became apparent that most young women's initial sexual experiences were forced or coerced. This is rape, only nationally it is not called that. The silence around this social scourge is large and destructive, because it empowers the violence to continue. Silence makes it proliferate. Incest is often also rape. Families, as we see from so many studies, have generational relations with rape, incest and other forms of sexual and domestic violence, yet they remain silent. These dynamics do not stop with one person raping one member of a family. They tend to continue.

Rape or sexual violence, even when the presumption is that a man has 'bought' a woman, is wrong. Although we, who are hell-bent on being Christians, argue that a man has the right to dominate his wife, in fact he has the right to dominate any woman because she is less than he is. This is not what the Bible or Christ meant.

The value of life

In the time of slavery, a slave master owned his blacks - women, children and men. They were not people; they were chattel, and as such had no rights. Rights came about later on. So, as the diary of 18th century slave owner Thomas Thistlewood can attest, women were used like beats of burden. Today, we have supposedly moved away form this way of thinking where one human being can own another human being. However, egalitarian thinking has become obsolete because particular groups see it as a god given-right for one person to own another person. When we enter into a marital agreement, apparently this is a contract where one body is sold to another master and can be disposed of at will.

We are now seeing the rise of new types of slavery, as author Bayo Akomolafe demonstrates in his work "Our shock will not absolve us: A letter to my son about the Libyan Slave Markets". It seems that the silence around slavery has become so deep and profound that we allow it to kill and objectify thousands of human bodies in the age of post-enlightenment reasoning. The silence about violence, sexual violence and rape within marriage, is that same kind of silence. It is the enforcing of a law that refuses to hear women's voices. It is a law, and a group of powerful people, who insist that women are worthless, even when some of them are women. We are silencing any voices that speak about the cruelty of our societies. When we make such irrational and poorly considered statements, we say that human rights are not due to women or blacks, as was argued in the 17th century and is now being argued again, only this time it is based on one's, sex, nationality, and economic power.

It is a heinous indictment on a society that claims to be modern and 'Christian' that daughters are sold when they marry them off and that violence against those daughters is a private matter. It is unacceptable for any man or woman in power to relate rape to Christmas in an attempt to remove the statement from the radar and to argue about hunger. It is a national disaster for any Parliament to argue that people are hungry at Christmas and so we cannot discuss martial rape, where we have argued that women's bodies are objects that shall be bought and sold like chairs and tables, shoes and socks. However, this is not far removed from when one Member of Parliament can say women like to be beaten and the women in the House laugh and agree.

Silence that allows this kind of national disaster to grow and develop destroys the country and the bodies within it, just as much as gang violence and murder every day are destroying our communities. When we condone rape, be it marital or otherwise, we condone the power of a person to use any other human as if they were refuse. Obviously, the discourse of slavery railed against by emancipators and evangelicals has found a new home and resides in the Christian community that celebrates the paganism of Christmas over the celebration of the birth of Christ who forgave and cavorted with the likes of Mary Magdalene. The mighty will never understand how far power will be used until it is used against them. Silence is deadly. The empowerment of sexual violence results in the kind of social decay and silence we are currently living. Obviously, governments are in the business of selling violence. By remaining silent on these matters we are killing ourselves through condoning and so perpetuating violence against ourselves and others.