grrlscene

Post 261.

16 Ways Activism Can End GBV

At the forum held on Friday, in collaboration with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and to kick off 16 Days of Activism to End Gender Based Violence, the Equal Opportunity Commission proposed changes to the Domestic Violence Act (Chp 45:56). Ten proposed changes are listed below:

1. Remove the perpetrator from the home not the victim. Moving women to a shelter can derail children and women’s lives. What happens when their time at the shelter runs out? Some women return home to the abuse.
2. Police must respond to all complaints. There are no penalties if police do not respond to all complaints. There are many stories of women who call for police help, but who wait in vain for them to come. Additionally, there should be a protocol for responding to all complaints. For example, a record should be made even if a woman is simply asking for police to warn her partner and isn’t yet ready for a charge to be laid or for a protection order.
3. Amend definition of cohabitant to include same-sex relationships. Violence exists across relationships of different kinds, and all citizens have a right to violence-free homes.
4. Police must charge for assaults and other crimes committed in domestic situations, and for breaches of Protection Order. When a woman goes to the police to report bruises from domestic violence, the police can charge perpetrators for assault, and begin criminal proceedings. What normally happens, however, is that police send women to a Justice of the Peace to begin her application for a protection order. Assault is assault and charges should be laid. Additionally, breaches of a Protection Order are a crime.
5. No bail for persons charged with breaches of Protection Order. Given the many women killed while holding protection orders, there is impunity for men who can breach them, can secure bail, and then return to get revenge on women.
6. Provide a network of support to persons who have a protection order – observers must have a duty to report (new section). When a woman is killed, neighbours, family and employers can recall years, months or weeks of threats. A duty to report will help build a culture of everyone insisting domestic violence cannot happen on our corner.
7. Create intervention for perpetrators threatening to kill (new section). When threats to women’s lives are made, what can they do? An intervention for perpetrators threatening to kill means that they will be held by police, receive counselling and other forms of intervention.
8. Create inter agency protocols between police, magistrates, prosecutors, social workers and shelters (new section). Right now, this isn’t sufficiently structured or practiced.
9. Create mandatory programs for victims and perpetrators. Mandatory counselling, over months, can make a difference to whole families, and should be part of the response to the approximately ten thousand applications for restraining orders requested yearly
10. Resuscitate Police Domestic Violence Register maintained by the Commissioner of Police. This registry is mandated by the Domestic Violence Act, but isn’t functional, digitized, well sourced with data or referred to in either civil or criminal proceedings.

Those at the forum also proposed six necessary changes:

11. Use the form provided by the DV Act to record reports of the domestic violence. This thorough form is not used consistently by police and legally needs to be as part of meeting the requirements of a National Domestic Violence Register
12. There should not be a twelve-month requirement to be able to secure a protection order. These must be able to be triggered by one act of violence regardless of how long relationship is going on. This is particularly important for young women, who have a higher risk of violence, and may be in shorter-term relationships.
13. A Victim and Witness Support Unit in Tobago. Establish it now.
14. The justice system must inform victims if perpetrators get bail. They cannot be calling around to find out whether their lives have returned to being at risk.
15. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based and Sexual Violence which has been sitting in front of Cabinet since 2016 must be approved and resourced.
16. End jurisdiction issues for reporting domestic violence. Victims report police officers refusing to take reports when they are friendly with the men involved, and police officers refusing to take reports when it is out of their jurisdiction.

These 16 days, lend your support to activism on 16 ways to help end GBV.

Post 260.

You haven’t encountered gangster until you’ve met the Indo-Caribbean grannies of Toronto’s Jane and Finch area. Originally from locations such as Berbice, Wakenaam and Beterverwagting in Guyana, these wizened ladies helped to fill the audience at Thursday’s University of Toronto launch of the collection, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, which I co-edited with Guyanese scholar Lisa Outar.

In their sweaters and wool hats, their sharp gaze was nothing less than inquisitive and intimidating. They looked like is two good whack for any backchat, for belonging to the wrong kind of mafia, for dotishly playing gunman like you have nothing better to do, or for not knowing how to conduct yourself like a fearless and good-speaking beti when your family sacrifice to send you to school.

Especially when you edit a collection with a lofty word like ‘thought’ in the title, you have to be able to convince nanis and ajis, with more common sense and experience than you, why that book matters. That’s what we set out to do in an event less like an academic book launch, and more like a chutney fete. Not because there was rum and ‘Coolie Bai’, though there was roti and coolie boys, but because the gathering was community-centered, multiethnic, multigenerational, and joyfully inclusive of multiple expressions of sexualities.

There was the girl, just seven, dancing in garara and gold after women musicians played sitar and tabla, and while a young woman painted, because art and film give us language when words fail. There were bright, next generation students, confident, political and completing PhD theses. Now playing the role of mentors, were mothers with professional careers, able to be there because grandmothers were at home with our children. There were Indian women writers whose ideas provided a home, since the 1980s, for nurturing our thinking about Caribbean theory. In this choka, were feminist badjohns with their solidarities and their laughter, who teach with love across racial divides. Then, in the centre, were these matriarchs, representing their community organization and its challenges to immigrant experiences of violence and poverty.

So, why should the collection matter? It’s a jahahin bundle, crossing oceans with many inheritances knotted in its pages. Tucked within are the legacies of Indian women in the Caribbean, and all the ways that they and indentureship have transformed us all in the region. It’s a remembering of foremothers who wanted more and pursued better for themselves and those who came after. It’s a warm enfolding of douglas and other mixes who are just as Indian too. There are cuttings of everything from carnival freedoms to matikor celebrations, from trance spiritualities to poetry. Finally, it’s a package tied with the gold threads of feminist work to live without violence, inequality or hunger, and to live with respect for matriarchal leadership and power.

And, were we able to talk good and show that education might not alienate us from our cultural histories as much as empower us to remake their relevance anew? ‘Is how much fuh this book?’, shouted one granny, at question time. And another, later, “I getting one too?”

So, in this collection’s travels from Guyana to Trinidad to New York, this week’s encounter is with the elder women of Jane and Finch’s concrete suburbs, our toughest crowd yet, who we managed to convince that another book mattered.

They left with copies because they came up and asked after, knowing it was deserved, and we were too honoured and terrified to say no. Lisa and I just handed over books, forget their cost or sale. Despite our degrees, when facing steely-eyed, no-nonsense grannies, who could wield a bilna like a gangster, we default to betis who know you just keep quiet and do what you are told. Our jahajin bundle was an inheritance from them, and our book might be the rare kind in which they recognize themselves as knowledge-bearers, feeling warm pride amidst Toronto’s cold.

Post 259.

The story isn’t on stage. It’s in the applause. That moment when a spontaneous connection erupts, and interrupts something we can all recognize, with something new –  a reverberation in the air between actors and audience, and a sense of possibility about which they agree.

I was watching poets from 2 Cents Movement perform their spoken word play about gender-based violence to secondary school students. My attention was drawn to students’ shouts of support, squeals of laughter, and raucous identification with both scenes of gender-based violence and scenes of resistance, realization and transformation.

The play is set in a café, meant to be a safe space for everyone, both women and men who have experienced violence and those who need to let go of their anger and will to harm. There’s a simple, but disturbing scenario where a couple comes in for a drink and he tells her what she should have, even when she says she wants something else, even when she says no.

A confrontation results, because we all know that’s how easy it is, maybe not over a mauby, but maybe over some other decision a woman isn’t allowed to make if her man disagrees. You can feel the girls identifying. They’ve seen this before. It isn’t new. That’s just as disturbing.

The boys are also familiar, but there’s ambivalence. They want to identify with the man. He’s articulate and in charge. He’s taking care of his woman and demands respect. Yet, violence is always ugly. The negotiation between the couple plays itself out among groups of girls and boys. They are not only interacting with the play. They’re reacting to each others’ experiences, responses and emotions.

There’s another brilliant transition when the waiter serves up a moment of solidarity, and both boys and girls react, for we don’t see this enough either. The man wants his order. The waiter gives him something else. He tells him that he is the boss and he is the man and he decides what his customer drinks. First, the man explains this isn’t what he wants. Then, he gets angry, the way experiencing domination breathes a slow, focused, incredulous anger into you. Then, it clicks. This is what it feels like to her. 2 Cents will say that when poetry drops, it’s louder than a bomb, and you hear it right then when that lesson lands on the man. Boom. Noise fills the room.

The applause comes again and again, at points I didn’t expect, with emotional outbursts that surprise me. Laughter at a tension that shouldn’t be funny reveals, rather than hides, discomfort and uncertainty or maybe desensitization to what shouldn’t be normal. Given the paucity of local television shows, as the couple negotiates, those school children are seeing something rare. They are watching someone who looks like them or could be their neighbor or friend rewrite a dominant and toxic script, stand up for herself and be prepared to walk away. The uproar is loud when she exits because she sets the terms for her relationship, at least in this play.

This is what school children need to see: Safe spaces as common as your corner rum shop or café. Men and women challenging violence, individually and together. Information about how to manage all that hurt, fear and lashing out. Honesty about how early it is that harm begins. Individuals open to accountability and equality when old ways are wrong and need to change.

After it’s done, students write what they learned about how to end GBV. Currently a collaboration among Bocas Lit Fest, Courts, 2 Cents Movement and the IGDS, we want those messages, in students’ own words, to reach you.

This movement can never be too large and such joyful noise can never be too loud.

One secret.

Such applause can bring quiet tears to your eyes when you stand watching from the back of the crowd.

Post 258.

Last week, behind its glass façade, the CCJ was the site for a historic battle not yet won. These are hard words to write given that a judgment was already handed down ordering the Belizean state to return ancestral land to the Maya people. So, if the battle was won, why still fight in court?

Put yourself in the footsteps of the Maya as you follow this story. In 2015, the CCJ affirmed the right of 39 Q’eqchi and Mopan Maya indigenous communities, in the Toledo District of southern Belize, to lands that they have historically used and occupied.

Up to last week, those lands were not legally returned, meaning Maya land rights remain unprotected, forcing the Maya people to return to the CCJ to press the Belizean government to abide by the ruling.

Maya community organizations also appealed to the courts to protect their lands from multiple concessions given by the government of Belize to oil, logging, grazing and agricultural interests. These incursions occurred without the Maya people’s free, prior and informed consent, and without any redress. Not only has the Belizean government not returned Maya village lands, it continues to destroy and parcel out leases for land not legally, historically or morally its own.

Meanwhile, the government of Belize was ordered to develop a mechanism to recognize Maya land rights claims in consultation with the Maya people. A Toledo Maya Land Rights Commission was established, but no elected or designated representative of any Maya community or body in Belize has ever sat on the Commission. It is run by state officials who are not sensitive to customary protocols of engagement, good faith or international law. The Maya must meet the Commission on its terms. Imagine a paper judgment which has not guaranteed justice, but been met with delay and denial.

The $300 000 Belizean dollars which the CCJ directed the government of Belize to invest in achieving compliance is being spent, on a range of costs including rent, vehicles, consultations, administration and salaries, without any compliance achieved. Recognising insult added to injury, last week, the court mandated 50% go directly to the Maya people.

They don’t have resources to keep going to the Supreme Court, and neither should the Belizean people be putting their resources to defending state violation. Maya organisations want the courts to impose sanctions and fines against the state, and have also have called for a tribunal with teeth to resolve these issues out of court. Imagine, three years ago, this is a battle they thought they won.

Cristina Coc, spokesperson for the Mayan Leaders’ Alliance, and a long fighter in this struggle, said to me, “This case is being watched by Indigenous communities all over who are using this case to leverage their own land claims, and it was highlighted in the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” This is happening in our midst in Port of Spain. The world is watching, are we?

Carrying the burden, costs and tears of this with them, Maya communities continue to organize, demarcate their traditional boundaries, and envision sustainable alternatives which put ancestral reverence for nature at the heart of a Maya economy. Cristina’s heart was heavy, but her words committed: “Maya people have to remain resilient in face of these challenges, uphold our wellbeing, be a self-sustaining people, resist these violations, and protect our lands, territories, culture and identity.”

Their struggle may seem far from yours, but injustice is something with which we can all identify. The Belizean government seeks to replace Maya victory with defeat. The injustice of a battle already won, yet still having to be fought, reflects on us all from the CCJ’s glassy front on Henry Street.