grrlscene

Post 351.

Monday 25 November was International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It begins what is globally known as 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence. The 16 Days Campaign ends on December 10th, which is Human Rights Day.

On Monday night itself, I got a late call about a woman, 30 years old and mother to two boys who are five and six. On Sunday, her boys’ father severely beat her and stabbed her in the head, violating a protection order, and almost killing her. His premeditated goal was to leave her dead. She’s now critical, in hospital, and will struggle with brain injury, physical injury and psychological injury for a very long time.

The call was to ask me for help. Was there subsidized housing available for this hard-working mother? Did I know anyone that could donate enough to pay her rent for the months of rehabilitation when she cannot work? Would anyone donate toward family therapy, or her single-handed financial responsibility for her boys? Was any system in place that could meet her needs in a timely, just, sufficient and realistic way?

I said I would see what I could do. Looking after her $3000 of monthly rent for a year isn’t an inconceivable donation and it could make the difference for generations. Please contact me if you are willing to help.

The problem of men killing women and mothers is real, with a face, a family and a cost. This horrific story is repeated again and again across the country. We can put a number to women murdered by their partners this year, but how many women have barely lived? To understand the relevance of this question, here are the facts.

One in three women in Trinidad and Tobago report experiencing physical or sexual violence from their partner in their lifetime. The majority of these women report experiencing violence “many times”.

In the 15 to 64 age bracket, over 100,000 women in Trinidad and Tobago are estimated to have experienced one or more acts of physical and/or sexual violence perpetrated by male partners. Approximately 11,000 are likely to still be in abusive relationships.

Understand that women are most vulnerable after they end a relationship, are no longer so easily controlled or threatened, have turned to the state for protection, and have tried to move on with their lives. Keep in mind that women take as long to leave as they do for many reasons. For example, 39% of women who stayed in violent relationships did not want to leave their children, 12% could not support themselves, and 11% had nowhere to go.

Women survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) are more likely to have problems: 40% report poor general health (vs. 28% for non-survivors), 24% report chronic body pain (vs. 11% for non-survivors), and 13% report difficulty performing usual activities (vs. 7% for non-survivors). Also among survivors, 31% are unable to concentrate, 9% need sick leave, and 10% lose self-confidence.

Survivors of intimate partner violence report greater trauma among their children. Signs of this include: 18% poor school performance i.e. having to repeat school years (vs. 9% for non-survivors), 14% incidence of bed-wetting (vs. 8% for non-survivors), and social behavior such as aggression among 10% (vs. 3% for non-survivors).

Young women and mothers are more vulnerable. Women whose partners are unemployed or have only primary school education are more vulnerable. Women with disabilities are more vulnerable. Shockingly, seven percent of women who have been pregnant experienced physical partner violence during a pregnancy. More than half reported being punched or kicked in the abdomen. Two in five experienced worse violence during that time than otherwise.

If you are a radio host, religious leader, politician, union leader or head of the maxi-taxi association, use these facts to call for accountability instead of impunity.

Your message is that perpetration of such violence must stop. Men have a role in ending the societal problem of male violence against girls and women. The government must immediately approve a comprehensive national prevention strategy. Each of us can change social norms that reproduce violence, and demand state systems that address harm and trauma in ways that bring justice and healing. Most of all, men must stop murdering women.

This message is urgent and necessary. Helping even this one woman is urgent and necessary. If you have a platform, use it. If you can, contact me to donate. Over these 16 days, commit to whatever individual and collective difference you can make.

Post 350.

As Carnival takes over airwaves, we can explore its representations of music, culture and sexual pleasure. These representations are often contradictory, drawing us into debate. They are sometimes more important than first appears, charting a historical moment, or highlighting generational change or US influence, or showing what adolescents, tuned in on Instagram and Youtube, are learning from us about empowerment and gender.

Destra’s recently released ‘Rum and Soca’ video is an intriguing mix of representations that signal much about our time. The video’s narrative is basically like the African-American movie, ‘Girls Trip’, which is a story of women’s friendship and a wild weekend of dancing, drinking, and romancing to excess.

This narrative is at home here in Trinidad and Tobago, with its long history of “girls’ limes”, and women drinking and wining with each other in fetes and on the road. It’s a welcome story as there are far too few videos of women enjoying themselves without performing at men’s command or for men’s pleasure or to attract men or as backdrop to a dominant male voice. “Party done” may have been the last time women were out like this on their own.

There are almost no men in Destra’s video and none on the mic. Those in the scenes are mere background to the social intimacy that affirms a right to woman-centred fun. The take up of a particular brand of consumer and celebrity feminism in Port of Spain is symbolized by the wealth and status of a limo, mansion, long blond wig and closet full of clothes combined with the Carnivalesque bacchanal of bam bam, and its emphasis on women’s licentious freedom as empowerment.

There’s much to say about such empowerment. It seems to be symbolized by drinking to excess, a privilege traditionally reserved for men. Destra herself has at least eight drinks, and I found myself wondering about the messages to adolescent girls. Such drinking has historically costed those who may find themselves assaulted and then blamed for getting to a point where they can’t remember their last name. Such risks of victim blaming are real and I wondered about the counter warning to young women that excessive alcohol consumption easily turns a sense of power into vulnerability.

The drunkenness is simply Destra keeping up. Men have been triumphing such excess for decades, from “Drunk and Disorderly” to “Rum till I Die”, and it’s debatable whether it’s fair to hold women to a higher standard. Indeed, one can argue that the video is also an Afro-creole version of a matikor, the Caribbean’s longest and most iconic historical expression of rum-drinking, women-only wining and queer potential in a safe space created by women themselves.

Yet, one can’t be naïve about alcohol marketing in the Caribbean. Only four brands are visible in the video. It’s almost blatantly an extended Angostura ad, following in the footsteps of Machel, who introduced advertising for his own rum into his repertoire of songs, because scraping the barrel in this way as an artist makes good business sense. Company branding conflated with cultural production should compel us to question the role that alcohol companies play in sponsoring and profiteering from fetes, bands, artists and videos, and encouraging young adults to become drinkers.

The video’s major intervention, however, is its erotic intimacy among women. Women’s same sex sexual attraction has been going mainstream with videos by Rihanna and Shakira, Shenseea, Rita Ora and Cardi B, Kehlani and Teyana Taylor, Janelle Monae, and more.

In these videos and in Destra’s, women are also holding hands, near kissing, and touching bodies in ways that blur the line between heterosexuality, bisexuality and lesbianism, or in ways that ‘queer’ being straight. Whether it’s alcohol, or sexual experimentation, or sexual fluidity, Destra’s video can be simultaneously read as straight and gay, as deliberately ambiguous, and as defying easy identity labels.

Such queering has a long history in the region. Yet, for lesbians in Trinidad and Tobago, same-sex desire isn’t something that happens when you’re drunk or that is about a night out. It’s an identity that isn’t taken on and off, and still carries great social stigma. One can only hope that women celebrities’ openness to ambiguity, play and enjoyment normalises challenges to homophobia and an inclusive world for women beyond its rules.

Cultural representations of empowerment, sexuality, womanhood and feminism in the Caribbean can be problematic as well as emancipatory, but shouldn’t simply be dismissed. Signs of our times, and their shifts and debates, continue to come in Carnival music.

Post 349.

The Darryl Smith fiasco seems like a model example of cover up after cover up. The fact that there’s still no commitment on behalf of state officials or political leadership to provide the truth of the matter, leaving more questions than answers, signals lack of commitment to ensuring that sexual harassment is a form of injustice that will not be tolerated or excused.

This is not surprising, if this was an issue taken seriously, political parties would all have their own sexual harassment policies, but the fact that these are as far away as legislation glaringly shows exactly how much impunity is an accepted reality.

We’ve heard about faults in the process of producing the report, but not that we can rely on the government and ministry to ensure that the public knows what really happened. It’s like the apparent faultiness of the report, which is based on the argument that Mr. Smith wasn’t given fair hearing, is more important than whether an employee of the ministry experienced sexual violence, which is what sexual harassment is, at the hands of a still-sitting Member of Parliament.

It’s like the lack of clarity about whether Michael Quamina was advising Mr. Smith or the ministry is as excusable as the $150 000 of public funds spent without accountability for the correctness of the process or its outcome. Who will ensure that the public knows the truth?

At this point, the hope seems to be that the whole thing will blow over and no answers will ever have to be provided. Sexual harassment legislation, if it ever comes, will not address this present injustice so the call should be for immediate answers as much as for longer term solutions. Those solutions include legislation, but require much more.

As the Equal Opportunity Commission, in its Guidelines on Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, has rightly stated, “It should be noted that criminalising sexual harassment does not address the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace as it does not speak clearly to employers, does not advise them of their duties, nor does it provide recourse to the victims.The criminal law does not achieve these goals”.

The public service now has a sexual harassment policy which requires the state to embark on widespread effort to create buy-in so that state agencies understand their responsibility, not only to victims, but also for creating workplace cultures that prevent such sexual violence in the first place. The key to preventing sexual harassment is for employers and managers to adopt a zero-tolerance position. This position is represented by having trained harassment response teams, inclusion of sexual harassment protections in collective labour agreements, informal and formal grievance procedures, and counselling support.

All these are necessary, but still not sufficient. While sexual harassment may be committed by an individual of any sex, largely it is a form of gender-based violence perpetrated by men, whether in workplaces or on the street. Primarily, it’s what Jackson Katz would refer to as male violence against women, often younger or more vulnerable or with fewer economic options. Ultimately tackling this issue requires change in men’s engagement with gender-based violence – whether as perpetrators or as allies in creating change.

The Prime Minister should have used this moment to explicitly state that sexual harassment is a form of labour exploitation that his government is committed to preventing, and can be held accountable for in terms of its leadership on this issue. The AG should have committed to legislation that doesn’t leave women mired in the limitations of a whistle-blower process.

I was surprised at accusations of women’s complicity in this injustice, and would like to instead take a break from demanding women’s responsibility for fixing everything and welcome men’s role in speaking out and taking action on these issues in a way that sees real, measurable change.