Dear Editor,
Ms C Springer, your Editor, from her chair in the newsroom asserts for my instruction that “domestic violence exists in all races, classes and in every sector of society.”
What she seems unwilling to conceive of, or incapable of conceding is that domestic violence exists in all “sexes/genders.” To make it clear, women are also guilty. This is the point of my letters. This is what, as idea, she finds offensive. Ms Springer needs a triumphant victim (woman) on one side and a diabolised victor (also essentially victim) on the other. That this position that I have expressed represents “an outmoded and bigoted” attitude contributing to perpetuating the problem is how Ms Springer responds to the threat to extending her all-embracing domestic violence victim categories to include men.
Is my approach outdated? The latest literature on the problem has gone far beyond the idea of a single and singular category of victim within the family. In fact my approach is very modern in that it grants “agency,” the capacity to act and think, to the category of “subaltern” to which women belong. Ms Springer’s approach creates a fossilised mosaic of the woman supine and capable only of a passive role. Being acted upon. This is no longer à la mode.
Second, questions of Guyanese sociology arise in her apparent affirmation that all women are suffering in the same way from the same causes and the same results. Man bad, she wishes to say and “race class and social status only enter the picture because of how people deal with the issue.” This is shockingly disingenuous.
Guyanese society is and has been segmented along racial, ethnic and social lines in all the useful studies that throw light on our problems. Do kick-down-the-door criminals and chain-snatchers represent a faithful sample of the social fabric? Do suicide victims? Does the population in psychiatric care reflect this proportionality and is there a “nosological” specificity linked to race? Does the proportion of unwed mothers reflect the ethnic and social composition of society? Since the last question is the one that concerns us it is useful to cite the figures I remember. More than 63% of the black newborns come into the Guyanese world to single mothers. Are the figures similar across the board?
To seek to obfuscate, to throw dust at problems that are specific to race and class in Guyana with a vague claim that “all awe is one” and suffering from the same diseases is not the way to go and reflects neither the perceptions abroad nor the historical or observed reality. Even domestic violence will take some specific forms and have some specific solutions. It is impossible to approach the problem otherwise.
Finally, it is particularly distressing to witness in this day and age the loss of the lessons from the social and human rights movements of the last three decades. A major one of which being that “you have to treat the accumulated pathologies of the perceived victims.” Meaning that in the same way Blacks in the New World have had to stop blaming the white man for everything and pull themselves together and stop hating themselves, women have got to stop blaming only men and examine and emancipate themselves.
Ms Springer, cussing me out only suggests that we want to continue, unreflectingly, doing the same things and then, when we get the same results, we simply displace the blame to that old victim, the black male
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
Editor’s note
To put it simply, the person who is to blame for any violent physical attack on another person is the person who commits the act, whether that person is male, female or transgender. Statistics available from Help & Shelter that were used to inform the position taken reveals that there were 218 Afro-Guyanese clients and 201 Indo-Guyanese clients, along with 131 listed as mixed; 9 Amerindians and 1 Portuguese. There was therefore never any reference direct or implied to the Black male in the article.
