The Tribune

THIS week, The Tribune is inviting a series of guest editorial writers to answer a single question - “What is one thing you would change?”

Today’s contributor is Paco Nunez of Human Rights Bahamas. Readers are invited to send their own suggestions to letters@tribunemedia.net.

WERE it up to me, I would change – or rather do away with – the entire matrix of social, cultural and political myths and assumptions used to condone and facilitate blatant discrimination against more than half the population of this country.

That may seem like more than one thing and maybe I’m cheating a bit, but bear with me:

Nowhere in our abundantly challenged society is a blatant lack of fairness, justice, fundamental rights and common decency more evident than in our treatment of women, both in law and everyday life.

As I write the debate rages yet again, for what seems like the hundredth time, over the unconscionable travesty that is the failure of successive governments to criminalize rape within a marriage. The Bahamas remains one of only 25 countries in the world, and one of only two in the Hemisphere, to deny mothers the right to confer nationality to their children on an equal basis to men. Meanwhile, civil rights activists continue to plead in vain for a legal framework to help tackle an alarming epidemic of gender-based violence and sexual abuse that is thriving at all levels of society.

This failure to legislate in the name of equality continues to provide both cover and fuel to a pervasive, twisted logic justifying all manner of further gender-based discrimination, whether institutional or casual, in the workplace or in the home, when it comes to questions of access to justice or even basic public services. It has nurtured a toxic atmosphere of female objectification, misogyny, sexual assault and victim blaming.

The Bahamas thus remains in shameful violation of its commitments under international law to ensure equality between women and men. It remains in violation of the standards of basic decency and respect for all individuals that should be a minimum requirement of any society that claims to be civilized and democratic.

Successive governments have paid lip service to righting this great legal wrong and perhaps some even meant it. But their efforts were hijacked by fear-mongers, misinformers and 15-minute-fame-chasing opportunists.

Digital trolls have drowned out rational argument with fake news. Doomsday criers continue to prophesy from the pulpit: “The sky will fall if women are afforded the same rights as men!” And so-called leaders who should know better, have allowed themselves to be intimidated by the din.

But democracy is not about surrendering to the most aggressive voices, even if they are in the most numerous. Protecting vulnerable individuals against a ‘Tyranny of the Majority’ and securing their fundamental rights even in the face of adverse public opinion is at least as important, if not more so.

Governments are elected to govern and legislate, and sometimes they must display the political courage to do so, despite the noise in the market, in defense of what they know to be morally and ethically decent.

So, I suppose that if I had to wish for one concrete change, it would be for the emergence of a group of politicians with the courage and integrity to end the institutionalized oppression of women in The Bahamas. Though it may affect their popularity among some groups in the short term, such leaders will be remembered in the long run as having been on the right side of history.

Of course, legislative change alone will not remove the deep, insidious and formidable matrix upon which gender-based discrimination is built. But it would be a start.