Dear Editor,
My sympathy goes out to the relatives of Sheniza Mohamed. Are there any left who are not touched by the rate at which we are losing our young women? We just lost another pretty young lady to several stab wounds. What in the world is going on?
I decided to check to see if there was any relationship between culture and jilted men killing women. The case of South Carolina is instructive. In an article ‘South Carolina: Where Men Murder Women and Legislators Don’t Care’ I found the following:
- Much of the phenomenon has to do with SC culture
- This includes a high tolerance of domestic violence, including the factor “where men have long dominated the halls of power, setting an agenda that clings to tradition and conservative Christian tenets about the subservient role of women.”
The above article is dated August 20, 2014. Another article titled ‘Men killing women: SC ranks 1st, again’ dated September 25, 2013 says as follows: “South Carolina once again has been ranked the worst in the nation when it comes to men killing women. The state’s rate of females murdered by males of 2.54 per 100,000 was more than double the national average, according to a report released Tuesday by the Violence Policy Center in Washington.”
So we can safely suspect that there are societal factors that make for the situation we have in Guyana (which would be different from SC) where the most dangerous time for a woman is when she decides to ditch a boyfriend. He doesn’t even have to be a spouse.
I discovered that one feature prevalent in these situations is a lack of education, but I want to float a theory. The failed political culture we have developed is at the root of the problem. Though the pace of these murders appears to have picked up (We will never really know unless we produce the stats) this has been happening since the 1980s. I recall interviewing a young man responding to a job vacancy. He poured out his problem with a young lady’s family. They did not want him to marry their daughter. A few days later he ended her life.
Could it be that the paucity of real job opportunities outside political control and the culture of depending on a political party for largesse has persisted for so many decades it has weakened our self-esteem and self-reliance so that a man considers himself so dependent on anyone but himself that he cannot let a woman go?
This might seem way out, but just think of the picture of the gentleman we saw a few months ago exulting as if he had won the gold medal. He had just learnt that he had won a contract. Subsequent events suggest that rather than his own knowledge and superior reputation and abilities there were other considerations at work. Something seems to have gone seriously wrong with the thinking of our menfolk. Too many of us have no pride. And it cuts across all races. The gentleman who killed the girl in the ’80s was of mixed race.
- You disagree. Gimme a better theory then!
Yours faithfully,
F Collins
