Marsha Hinds is the immediate past President of the National Organization of Women of Barbados and the co-founder of Operation Safe Space. Marsha has been an advocate for women and girls in Barbados for twenty years and is committed to continuing to utilize her skills in seeking equity and inclusion for Caribbean women. She recently defended her PhD dissertation, and her research interests include the Caribbean intellectual tradition, Caribbean women and girls’ equity and the systemic relics of racial slavery.
For a very long time, Barbados has served as the positive basis for comparative analysis on almost any regional issue, ranging from success in economic management to the management of crime to the delivery of social services like education and healthcare. I have always struggled with the categorization of Barbados as a model of post-colonial success in comparison to some of our CARICOM neighbours.
This struggle became deeper as I studied politics as a teenager at the Barbados Community College and then Gender and Development Studies at the Nita Barrow Unit Institute for Gender and Development Studies. Those two learning experiences in particular, provided me the analytical tools and academic frameworks to begin to understand the experiences I had had with different forms of abuse growing up as a girl in Barbadian society.
Volatile family relationships and abuse of women and girls are colonial relics. Several writers, including historians Bridget Brereton, Lucille Mathurin-Mair and Verene Shepherd have discussed the experiences of women and the transatlantic trade in African bodies. Writers disagree about the extent to which women developed counterstrategies against sexual violence and the inability to make decisions about reproduction and their children but there is consensus about the levels of violence, including sexual violence, and dehumanization as a tactic to exploit and control African female bodies. Scholars like Verene Shepherd, Patricia Mohammed and Gaiutra Bahadur have done important and similar work on the sexual and other forms of violence faced by Indian women who arrived in the post-emancipation period as indentured labourers, and the legacies of this violence in the present-day Caribbean.
There has never been a comprehensive social project to challenge and transform the views associated with Caribbean women, and Barbados is no exception. Therefore, it is simplistic to view Barbados as if is in some way better or different from St. Vincent and the Grenadines or Guyana or St. Lucia or Trinidad or Jamaica when it comes to the issues of violence against women and girls. If we see violence against women narrowly as the death of women at the hands of their intimate partners, the higher levels of these incidences in neighbouring territories gives Barbados a fake exceptionality. However, as soon as we recontextualize death as only one outcome in a series of ways that female bodies can be and are abused and violated, Barbados takes her position as a Caribbean society facing an issue that is pervasive, complex, and facilitated by unchallenged historical patriarchy and misogyny (hatred and contempt of girls and women).
As an advocate working directly with women and girls affected by gender-based violence in Barbados, I have long argued that we fail ourselves as people working to bring attention to the plight of our sector because we do not have an adequate representation of Barbados’ epidemic. We only define it in terms of what we do not have with respect to other Caribbean countries. Knowing that as many Barbadian women are not killed by their intimate partners as other CARICOM sisters is not to know how many girls are robbed of their inheritances through financial abuse from male family members. It is not knowing how many women have sustained and/or chronic mental wellness or illness issues because they live with the trauma of sexual violence in childhood or from domestic violence, including at the hand of intimate partners.
In Barbados, we do not know how many women are living with long term injuries caused by domestic violence and how that affects their ability to be productive members of society. Barbados does not measure its epidemic of domestic violence in any way, and it has been difficult to get the issues of women and girls centred on the governmental agenda, despite us having elected our first female Prime Minister in 2018.
Along with the first female Prime Minister, we have the first female director of public prosecutions in Barbados and several of the permanent secretaries running ministries are female. Yet notwithstanding these milestones, there was not a single gender specific policy that Barbados can point to since 2018. Not one. This is the first time that we have had two Throne speeches in the single term of one government. I was particularly interested in the second Throne Speech, delivered in September 2020, because it came far enough in the term of the government led by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, that allowed for clear articulation of policy direction. The guard had been changed over two years ago and there had been time to conduct the necessary analysis to address this epidemic of violence against girls and women.
Disappointingly, there was not a single policy in the 2020 throne speech that addressed the plight of women and girls in the country, although there had been several worrying events in the country leading up to the September speech. In a media article in July 2018, Police Commissioner Tyrone Griffith lamented that the Royal Barbados Police Force was burdened by levels of domestic violence and how much police resources the incidents required. There was no response from our government, then or up to the time of writing.
We are weeks shy of the second anniversary – July 24, 2021 – of the deaths of two innocent children in a case of a domestic situation gone awry. This incident did not trigger an investigation into the way that matters of custody are treated in cases where there is abuse as a factor in maintenance cases. The judiciary in Barbados is still not utilizing welfare principles when making decisions on child custody matters. The principles are best practice and are used by Caribbean neighbours, including Trinidad and Tobago. They ensure that custody matters consider factors that would put children at risk of injury (including emotional peril) when deciding on their custody arrangements. The aim is to ensure that decisions are made in the best interest of the child as the paramount concern and is fundamentally different from what currently obtains in Barbados where the deciding factor often seems to be what is in the best interest of the visiting parent (usually a man).
Two women lost their lives at the hands of their intimate partners during the term of our first female Prime Minister, one of them the daughter of a sitting diplomat in the Prime Minister’s government. Domestic violence is pervasive throughout our society, but where is the commitment to address it? As if we are completely going in the wrong direction, and to add insult to injury (and death), the Chief Justice handed down a ruling at the end of May 2021, which sought to limit the definition of ‘former spouse’ by time for victims seeking protection orders. This ruling significantly diminished the already paper-thin legal recourses of victims of violence in Barbados to be able to insulate their lives from abuse.
A few weeks ago, Barbadians learned of a fifteen-year-old child who was savagely beaten and raped as she traversed the outskirts of our major city, Bridgetown, in broad day light. The incident was heinous and will leave a child with lifetime scars. What is even more concerning and egregious is that this case is not an isolated incident. The rape of this child is a part of a trend of daily reports of grooming, molestation and incest affecting girls in Barbados which feature prominently in newspaper court pages. Teachers, nurses and community practitioners see the effects of this abuse daily. Many of them feel helpless about who they should call to report these issues and get help for the affected children.
The incident is even more chilling given that it occurred in the same spot where a woman’s naked and lifeless body was found last year July. There is an all-girls’ school and a Convent just across the road from the spot. No one has been apprehended in either the murder of 2020 or the rape and beating of 2021.
Shortly after the rape, the lodging of three British tourists was invaded. As if that was not enough, the Minister of Tourism, Lisa Cummins reported that one of the tourists was sexually assaulted. Then three women were seriously injured in a house fire. The fire was set by the former intimate partner of one of the victims. The toddler daughter of the victim and perpetrator remains in critical condition from her injuries. The victim’s mother perished from her injuries.
On Saturday, July 24th, a story about street harassment prompting a young professional to return to Hong Kong from Barbados went viral. The woman came to Barbados on the welcome stamp offer which the government introduced to encourage relocation to Barbados for one year of work as a way of compensating for COVID short stay visitor drop offs in the tourism sector. None of this has as yet caused the government to make a statement or address the issues.
To call out the silence of the government headed by the first female Prime Minister of Barbados on the issues affecting women and girls is not to suggest that that silence started with this administration. It is, however, to express deep disappointment that the silence did not end with Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s government. Additionally, COVID-19 has changed the world irrevocably and shown the ways in which women’s gains can be so easily unravelled, with a change in viable economic activity outside of the home and adjusted burdens for care work.
Given where the women of Barbados find themselves in 2021, we who lead the non-governmental charge to continue to hold safe space for the women and girls of Barbados must sound the alarm about our country and demand better. That is what a group of us have embarked on, under the broader umbrella called Operation Safe Space.
The last major incident in February of a naked girl being discovered in the problem plagued detention centre for juvenile offenders, resulted in a public petition to protect the girls of Barbados which garnered 5,988 signatures. A part of the outrage of the public was that many of the girls who end up in the facility are victims of molestation and are charged with an archaic offense of wandering when they seek to leave unsafe homes and find other refuge. This time around, we firmly believe that the effort to draw attention to the plight of women and girls in Barbados must gain the attention of all leaders across Barbados.
It is seemingly easy for our government to ignore the voices of 5,988 citizens, but we hope that when we can line up the concerns of the business community, the church, sporting administration and political leaders across the spectrum (including those in the leading party who are prepared to break the silence in the national interest), that more reflection, conversation and action will occur. The first step in pushing back the epidemic of gender-based violence and its effects on women and girls in Barbados will have to be accepting that Barbados is not exceptional on this matter. Women and girls are not safe in Barbados – we share this tragic inheritance with our other Caribbean sisters. We invite other Barbadians living in other CARICOM territories and beyond to participate in this movement as well.
Enough must be enough! I hope this is the point at which the enduring pain of one child is enough to change a nation, and open the conversation and action about the epidemic violence faced across the region.
