Diary of a mothering worker. April 6, 2022.

Post 460.

THERE ARE a number of observations to make about Amar Deobarran’s gruesome murder of Omatie Deobarran on April 1. 

The first is people’s disbelief that a diligent teacher, “upstanding citizen” and “very educated” guy “who loved his children” could also be abusive, repeatedly and lethally. It’s important to know that men exactly like this can do exactly these things. The fact that it can be any man is what is meant by it being “normalised.”

When people act so surprised it makes it less likely for women to break their silence about abuse by respectable men because it’s so hard to be believed and because people choose sides based on what they know, their own interests and biases.

Yet, violence isn’t meted out by some recognisable outcast or pathological exception, its perpetrated (like rape) by men who appear like any other. Recognising this, we can understand why all workplaces, religious spaces and communities have a responsibility to treat these issues of gender-based violence as if they are deep and real, however hidden, in their midst. 

The second is the family’s reported disbelief that Amar Deobarran could kill. Omatie Deobarran’s family reportedly advised her to “try and mend up things” despite the fact that Amar would “pick up a cutlass and knock it right round the hammock” when she was in it. 

At one point it seems that Omatie was to continue living on the same compound as a man who was recorded threatening to “saw off” her neck. Newsday reported that Amar was planning to evict her from their home, and described him and his mother telling her to go. It is commonplace for men to threaten to kill their wives, girlfriends or ex-partners, and for families to tolerate and defend them. Indeed, threats are often trivialised by families and ignored as a crime by police.

As a society, there is also significant dysfunction in how we understand love, whether in relation to beating children or condoning controlling and violent behaviour. Newspaper headlines are often guilty of just such confusion, misrepresenting men’s killing of women as acts of “passion” or blaming women for not choosing their men wisely. 

The Express represented Omatie’s murder as linked to her filing for divorce, not Amar’s infidelity and its consequences nor possibly his retaliation at custody arrangements resulting from his actions, and reinforced the message that women who decide to leave are the least safe because they “trigger” men to kill. 

Express’s headline focused on Amar Deobarran’s suicide. Omatie was merely described as “wife.” Guardian ran a story on how “Sir” changed after his father died of covid19, though problems clearly preceded that. No newspaper printed, “Unfaithful husband kills woman, self,” which would shift our perception of an inexplicable act by a caring man who “in a sudden twist” (to quote the Guardian) could kill a woman in front of their child. 

Third, it is therefore also absolutely essential that we talk about how a parent that loves his children could murder in front of them. All the data (see the Trinidad and Tobago Women’s Health Survey 2018) points to how much violence takes place in front of children, and against women when pregnant. This is something else that workplaces, schools and religious communities need to take seriously. It’s one of many reasons we should be teaching about gender-based violence prevention and protection in schools. 

News reports suggest that Omatie was fighting back for months, such quarrels were affecting the children, and that they were all seeing a counsellor, though Amar stopped going. One family member suggested that the murder was a response to court-mandated visitation with a court marshal, and where a man threatens a woman’s life, it should be clear to us by now that their children – as witnesses or victims – are also not safe. 

What should women do? Suffer in silence and be blamed for not leaving, thus exposing their children to the slow burn of family chaos and brutality? Hire an attorney and be blamed for leaving, risking men’s anger at having custody and access challenged? Are courts prepared to mandate lethality assessments which can protect women and their children? And how much more must be said about men’s responsibility for their violence before families acknowledge that this is where it can end? 

It’s because so many are surprised by “Sir” that we can imagine this is a common and familiar, though frequently unrecognised, scenario. Omatie’s story shows us so many signs, perhaps her death can stop another heartbreaking headline.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. February 2, 2022.

Post 452.

I COULDN’T let this week pass without remembering Andrea Bharatt and the one-year anniversary of her disappearance on January 29, 2021. What words about sexual violence against women could I say which I have not said again and again? 

One year later, women are no less afraid. The macabre irony of another murdered woman found half naked in Aripo Savannah on January 30, almost in the same place and almost to the day, reminds us that the war against women remains alive. 

It is a war in which women are targeted because of their sex and in which men’s sexual violence is part and parcel of their lethality. 

We don’t just live in fear, we live in wait for the next brutality. The story of another lost 18-year-old like Ashanti Riley, innocently travelling to her grandmother, would horrify, but not surprise. Another minor sexually assaulted in a taxi would cause us to caution her to be more careful, warnings that come like a rite of passage, and an unjust responsibility.

There were no marches for Shadie Dasrath, 31, found nude in her bedroom in December. Her common-law husband has been charged with her murder. 

Before men kill there are always patterns of threat, control, anger, cruelty and rape so normalised that they are commonly excused. 

In-between the tragedy of Ashanti’s disappearance on November 29, 2020 and Andrea’s discarded body found on February 4, 2021 is the ill-conceived headline published in the Guardian, “Woman raped after smoking marijuana with attacker.” I use it to teach students about victim-blame and woman-blame, and about those women who are not considered angels or perfect, so often represented as deserving of whatever violence men mete out to them. 

The real story is that the woman was sleeping next to her baby when she awoke to find the man raping her. With her baby as witness, the man pointed a gun at her and threatened to shoot her in her own home. Why didn’t the headline say, “Man rapes and threatens to shoot woman asleep with her baby?” What is the message still being sent about where responsibility for violence lies? 

In the midst of this, men’s rights representatives in Trinidad and Tobago sought headlines for the issue of violence against men and boys. Women feature in such violence as mothers or guardians and intimate partners. However, this is continually hyper-emphasised over men and boys’ more pervasive, dispersed and lethal violence to other boys and men. 

Locally, men and boys are killed in domestic violence disputes (by other men). They also experience sexual and other forms of abuse in their homes (predominantly, though, not only by men). Globally, they die in unspeakable numbers from wars and gang warfare among men. They experience bullying mainly from other boys. Mass shootings in the US are perpetrated by boys and men. 

The language of this campaign to establish an international day for this issue side-steps this reality of perpetration entirely, focusing only on men and boys as victims, citing “invisible” brothers, fathers and sons, “vulnerable boys and voiceless men.” Feminists have long been concerned about these intersectional forms of violence and a lot of money has been spent on them across the hemisphere.

Like women, men fear men. What they don’t fear is the sexual abuse and sexual violence that are a threat to girls and women every day. Competitive men’s rights staking of terrain doesn’t recognise inequalities in perpetration, but Andrea and Ashanti’s memory must not allow us to forget. 

I wondered why this campaign so completely missed the need to name and end male violence, from wars, gangs and prisons to bondage of women sex workers in brothels to the sexual violence which threatens with a gun or instead physically bludgeons at home, stabs to death in front of children, sets on fire in a car, buries in a grave or leaves naked or half-naked raped and dead in a forest. 

I’ll repeat recommendations in other columns as I have before and will again. Today, I’m shuddering with recognition. One year later, even as we still protest, we have not changed the world from which these young women were taken.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. February 24, 2021.

Post 409.

SOCIAL movements always need both action and reflection. The protests and vigils of the past two weeks have been immense. It was unbelievably powerful to see thousands take to the streets to express their horror at continued violence against women. This was a landmark moment in Trinidad and Tobago history, one which we should take some time to understand.

Many ideas mixed in those crowds, from those who believe mothers have primary responsibility for whom sons become to those who think that boys need strong male role models to become better men. Looking on, the confluence of views and messages was complex, and at times problematic.

I was intrigued by women and men’s hope that such public outcry, including businesses closing or women staying home, would result in real change. I was hopeful too, but more focused on the work that would continue after everyone went home. Would our advocacy be more immediately effective following these massive numbers? Would the Government make soothing pronouncements on which it didn’t follow up? Would those who came out also try to make a difference in the long term, and in what ways? What opportunities had we gained for systemic change?

Men joined with signs and statements in numbers I’ve never seen, organising rallies and sharing their solutions as citizens, police, business leaders, and poets. Others became women’s-rights activists overnight, leaving us to hope they understand the painstaking work it takes to shift gender socialisation, ensure women’s reproductive rights, end homophobia, reduce male domination in leadership, and orient state policy and action toward advancing gender equality and social justice, for that is what it will actually take to end gender-based violence.

Machel put out a song about protecting women, despite the fact that women don’t want protection. What we want are rights, justice and freedom.

It was amazing how many ideas people had. We found taxi drivers leading in creating safer transport for women and girls, through their own self-organisation. Others recommended finally filling vacant positions in social services and policing, which can help improve state response. Some recommended mandatory mediation between victims seeking protection orders and abusers, despite the fact that this potentially further endangers individuals who fear for their life.

The State approved pepper spray, now putting women’s protection even more in their own terrified hands. There was no promise of a gender-sensitive transport policy, though measures such as a mobile app, lights which would be fixed to hired vehicles, a QR code which could be scanned, and a renewed registration exercise for all drivers were announced.

Fascinatingly, the PNM used the moment to reintroduce the old idea of a monorail, even though that wouldn’t help women get to the far reaches of the country where transportation is most insecure.

Andrea Bharatt’s casting as a “perfect victim” perhaps also allowed us to cross a line forever in victim-blaming, but it saddened me that 18-year-old Ashanti Riley, going to her grandmother’s on a Sunday, was not equally considered to have been perfect or a tipping point for us all.

These weeks achieved something, perhaps many things, but we are not entirely sure what.

Varying agendas gained ground. It’s clear that there has been some social-norm change. It was heartening to see feminist language about women’s rights and transformation of masculinities on placards across the country. State language may become more careful, for what prime minister will again tell women that he is “not in their choice of men,” given how many girls go missing, how many serial rapists roam, the increase in women’s reports of domestic violence since March last year, and state culpability in failing to adequately resource any real prevention strategy thus far?

What is not clear is whether our society is actually any safer. I’d be surprised if anyone thinks it is. There were attempted kidnappings of women travelling by taxi last week alone.

Our challenge now is not about ideas, but implementation and accountability. Rather than mushrooming into disparate initiatives, we need to partner with core groups working on these issues for decades. There is more work going on than most realise and this is the moment to build impact and reach.

Over the next weeks, I will be highlighting such work, and invite groups pursuing solutions to share them with me. If we agree that our society is no safer than before, what are our next steps?

We need to know what each other is doing, share our analyses, strengthen our collaboration, and agree on effective strategies.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. February 10, 2021.

Post 407.

“WE WANT justice!” is the powerful cry echoing across the country, and one can’t help but think that political elites are watching from behind security protection, waiting for gatherings to die down so that we can be thrown scraps of disconnected reform.

When citizens take to the streets in these numbers, it is a sign of widespread desperation, of a system so failed that people feel they must shout to be heard, of trust so broken that people will gather in anger outside of our institutions, believing justice cannot be found inside.

I keep wondering if we will see continued protest, knowing that we can expect dozens of women and girls to be killed or go missing this year. When will numbness or a sense of powerlessness set in? Or, as I hope, will feelings of horror, trauma, fear and anger continue to build with each report that confirms men’s war against women, prompting more to the streets?

This is not the time for men to say, “Not me.” Not when grandfathers, uncles, fathers, cousins, neighbours, maxi drivers, teachers, pastors, bandits and other forms of predators roam with impunity in our families and communities, or are on extended bail, or are freed by a court system that appears corrupt, inefficient and haphazard, in which it takes years to start a trial. Women’s and girls’ right to justice is not and has never been anyone’s priority.

To this day, we blame women. To this day, we do not yet hold men, including at all levels of leadership, sufficiently accountable for a world in which they are dominant. Men must make this change, without taking over or speaking instead of women or trivialising decades of ongoing feminist advocacy. Certainly, our investment in patriarchal power must be destroyed, despite all the discomfort that may bring. Women cannot continue to be fodder for this violent monster.

Young women are living in terror; nowhere safe. They are panicked about using public transport, as they long have been. They feel abandoned by state and society, as they should, for they face the greatest risk of daily harm in homes, on streets, in taxis and at school, by any or possibly every man. They are growing up in a state of perpetual self-defence, and even that offers no real protection. Women are driving with a weapon in one hand. Women and girls are under greater surveillance from brothers, fathers and boyfriends than ever before, further sacrificing freedom. We can do everything right and still be killed.

Amidst these disappearances and deaths, we struggle, as we have and as we will for real solutions. “No bail for rapists” is one call, but the bail amendments proposed holding suspects without charge for 120 days. What happens when they must be released if no charges are laid? What happens when court delays, magistrates’ decisions, and police absenteeism lead to rapists being freed, as with Andrea Bharatt’s alleged kidnapper?

Even if we make rape a non-bailable offence –, because who doesn’t want to get rapists off the streets – keep in mind that murder is non-bailable, and killings continue unabated. Hanging has remained legal, but has not been a deterrent. Neither are stand-alone solutions.

The AG has blamed women’s groups for the Sex Offenders Registry not being public. We recommended the registry not be public because its use is for an integrated police and court response, because the public would run perpetrators from one community to a next, and because the majority of sex crimes remain unreported and committed by male family and friends.

We already know so many sexual abusers. We tolerate and protect them for the sake of family name, respectability and survival. We don’t need a registry to tell us who they are, some of us always know. Again, it is one strategy for protection, not a solution.

The AG is also aware that vigilantism is a likely outcome. Sex offenders might get community licks, and maybe even dumped for dead in the places women are. That is a dangerous road he now seems prepared to go.

There are many other necessary paths. Vision 2030 promised a National Transportation Policy. It should treat women and girls’ risk, as we saw with Ashanti Riley, as a national emergency. There must be co-ordinated transport-system solutions that urgently respond to women and girls’ needs. We will make and must back these demands with public pressure over future days and deaths.

We are deep in battle, and no shortcut will win this war.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 16, 2020.

Post 402.

Sometimes, when I’m quietly at my desk, the media calls for a statement on another murdered woman, and I haven’t yet heard the news, and my instinct is to just sit silently in shock despite demands to respond immediately. Quite often, despite having so many recommendations at my fingertips, I’m at a loss for words. It’s regret that we couldn’t do enough to save another child from abuse or another girl from disappearing or another woman from death.

Sometimes, I send the media to other advocates, from Women of Substance or the Organisation for Abused and Battered Individuals or the Coalition Against Domestic Violence or CreateFutureGood or Womantra, and I wonder if their heart will sink the way mine does when they get that call.

Sometimes, I’m just tired thinking and talking about violence. It feels never-ending, like waiting for the next story, or knowing that so much harm to women and girls is occurring in the peacefulness of each night and remaining unreported. Despite the need to be aware, there are mornings when I can’t read the news. As a nation, we are so traumatised by stories we hear. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like for victims, and the cost they pay for our slowness to change hangs heavy in my chest.

It must be like this for so many who are addressing violence in a sustained way: social workers, counsellors, service providers, police officers, shelter managers, those working in child protection, those providing victim and witness support, media workers, advocates and activists. I think about the trauma they carry, as we all do, with each story. I think about how much I have to stay abreast of interviews, opinion pieces, political leaders’ statements, and debates about violence against women and girls, and it makes me very tired. Sometimes, I close my eyes and wish it was easy to not care.

Violence doesn’t only traumatise victims and families, its harm spreads wide for it also brings feelings of fear and powerlessness, injustice and sadness. People want more guns. I want more social workers. More of those healing rather than harming communities everywhere.

Sometimes, I think I’m not very good for my family, for I’m hardly present enough, and I often miss the chance to take a walk with Ziya or have breakfast together or spend time with her while she falls asleep at night. There are costs to this commitment; costs to time, energy, and mental and physical health. I wonder if I’m failing to make memories with her, for I seem to always be working, in some way, to make a difference. I wonder how much women have to give before they burn out. I wonder how everyone else does it. I dream of a month where there are no reports of abuse so I could spend more time with my family, set aside advocacy, and pretend injustice doesn’t exist.

I didn’t want to leave this year’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence without thinking of all those giving as much as they can to end violence in families and against children, to help victims secure justice and find healing, and to improve state response. I know they are tired. They were tired when young Shannon Banfield was killed in December four years ago. In the wake of Ashanti Riley’s killing, they are even more tired today.

We think about victims and families, and distressed communities, but we don’t often understand the impact on those responding, the care and understanding they need from their partners, and the exhaustion they carry. Sometimes, I know that they return home at the end of the day as emptied individuals with nothing more to give even to those they love.

To those that are doing this work, I wish you rejuvenation. I wish you time with loved ones. I wish you a sea bath to wash away the pain you encounter daily. I know you have dedicated your life to a better world. I know weariness will not stop your commitment. In my last words on violence for this year, I honour your contribution and impact, however incremental. I write to thank you for the work that you do.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 9, 2020.

Post 401.

When will it be safe to travel by taxi? When will no one get raped in church? When will fathers not rape daughters in a security booth? When will a ten-year-old girl never again have to survive being smothered while molested repeatedly by a man the family trusted? When will we be safe in our bedrooms?

When will killers stop stuffing women into a barrel or leaving them dead on a river bank or beaten bloody on a forest floor or beheaded in front of their families? When will women never again be bludgeoned outside their work or set on fire in their home or stabbed to death outside of a school?

When will men no longer drug girls and drag them home claiming they are their daughters? When will adolescent girls no longer disappear at rates higher than any other group in our society? When will migrant girls stop being the most vulnerable to trafficking and sexual exploitation?

When will the threat and fear of sexual violence not define the lives of girls and women from birth to death? When will a baby always be free from rape and incest? When will there be sufficient safe houses? When will perpetrators be put out by police so that families can be safe in their homes?

When will male partners, husbands, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, cousins, police officers, church elders, teachers, taxi drivers, bandits, businessmen and traffickers stop sexually violating, raping and beating women, girls and boys?

When will we acknowledge how many pregnancies result from unwanted sex, forced sex, and rape? When will we acknowledge how many miscarriages result from women being beaten while pregnant? When will we be honest that women are raped by their partners in front of their children because making children witness violence is a known and common practice to instill silence, compliance and fear?

When will the media not describe a man’s sexual assault of a mother with the headline that she was smoking ganja as if that was an invitation to rape, when he pointed a gun at her head and at her baby? When will we no longer say a woman was raped or beaten or killed and instead report that another man beat, raped and killed, putting attention and responsibility on those committing acts of violence?

When will state officials stop speaking as if women choose violence by wearing a skirt, going to lime, agreeing to a relationship, playing mas, or wanting to keep their job?

When will more men hold their bredren accountable for their violence? When will they stop men from preying on young girls as happens every day? When will the majority of men stop staying silent? When will they only show boys to obey women and girls’ right to be free and safe? When will someone always intervene?

When will we realise women stay because they can’t financially afford to leave, they fear the licks they’ll get if they do or they believe they or their children will be murdered if they go? Don’t we see that women are at greatest risk of being murdered when they try to leave? How can we blame women when perpetrators leave a trail of victims as they go from relationship to relationship?

When will churches and mosques and temples acknowledge that women are deathly afraid and may have nowhere to turn because families send them back and religious leaders advise women to stay, to keep trying, to be forgiving and to be more submissive? When will religious leaders stop telling men that their rightful role is to lead women when these very beliefs are the root cause of so many women’s vulnerability?

When will mothers never again be complicit in the abuse and prostitution of their children? For no children should be sacrificed by adults, regardless of their own fear and trauma or need to survive.

When will every perpetrator be named by those who know them? When will there be programmes targeted at perpetrators?

When will we stop being asked for solutions after repeating the solutions again and again year after year amidst political lip service, state under-resourcing, and leaders’ misguided admonitions of women? When will one little girl or boy be too many? When will one more woman killed be considered a reason for a national emergency? When will Ashanti Riley’s horrific murder become a wake-up call for action and measurable results that create transformation? When will we finally do enough?

If not today, if not now, when? When?

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 21, 2020.

Post 396.

I’ve struggled with what to express other than haunting sadness at the killing of Tenil Cupid, and my condolences to her family and her children. I’ve wanted to write a column printed with blank space, where words would otherwise fill the page, to compel a pause, a moment of quiet, when we all still our steps, as we do for the national anthem, to remember that she was just 23 years old. We are a nation where young women are not safe, where they cannot love and choose to leave, and where men’s lethal violence produces generational trauma, pulling both boys and girls into its cycle.

I’ve struggled because statistics predict such pain and loss. All the recent studies of violence prevalence in the Caribbean, from Guyana to Jamaica to Grenada to TT, point to established risk factors in young Tenil Cupid’s life.

First, entering intimate relationships before 18 years old, particularly with much older male partners (who are legally sexual predators committing the crime of rape and child sexual abuse).

Second, motherhood and, especially, adolescent motherhood, for example, beginning at 15 years old and continuing through teenage years with multiple births.

Third, limited education, as well as relatively low school achievement of male partners.

Fourth, insufficient income and economic dependency on partners with low income, particularly when children must be fed and schooled. Keep in mind that young women under 24 have higher rates of unemployment than young men, suggesting complex power relations which they must negotiate to be secure and survive.

Fifth, the decision to end a relationship and to escape a male partner’s controlling behaviours and dominance. These behaviours are an absolute key red flag for femicide, whether the triggers are substance abuse or a new relationship or financial crisis and conflict.

There are hundreds each year who enter young womanhood in these circumstances, and additional experiences of child abuse and neglect. These are girls raised without sufficient information and support to make healthier decisions, and in circumstances that increase their vulnerability to much of what Tenil Cupid lived.

In the women’s movement, we worry whether women are being killed at younger ages, at the increase in such killing and at the state’s inadequate response in terms of having social welfare workers go to vulnerable homes in communities as they used to; appropriate psychosocial intervention for children at an age when it can still make a difference; and a serious national campaign against male predation as an accepted social norm.

As the Coalition Against Domestic Violence cautioned, after the murder of 29-year-old Reshma Kanchan, “we cannot run away from the intersecting relationship of domestic murders with gender inequality and harmful masculinities.”

That this intersection affects women everywhere was poignantly shown in Womantra’s Silent Silhouettes short documentary where murdered women and their children were shown in everyday places, their absence marked by the dark space and shape left by their missing bodies.

Conceptualised around 2006, by the Network of NGOs of TT for the Advancement of Women, to encourage us to emotionally connect to lost lives such as Tenil Cupid’s, these silhouettes also represent Jezelle Phillip Fournillier, Gabriella Dubarry, Naiee Singh, Trisha Ramsaran-Ramdass, Adanna Dick, Vera Golabie, Sherian Huggins, Joanna Diaz Sanchez, and Reshma Kanhan; all murdered by (mostly former) partners this year.

To better understand femicide prevention, the coalition has called for “comprehensive and multidisciplinary investigation into domestic murders” to assess the circumstances of both victim and perpetrator, whether a history of abuse was known to family and community, whether actions were taken to protect the victim, and whether any services were sought from state institutions. It also continues to recommend “school and out of school-based interventions, gender sensitive parenting programmes, and programmes engaging men including perpetrator/batterer interventions.”

The GBV Unit has responded, citing 220 arrests and 290 charges since January. However, convictions are beyond the unit’s ambit, and in TT are notoriously low, signalling how the judicial system slowly but surely reproduces impunity.

As Conflict Women urged this week, the Government must make “prevention and redress of violence against women a key part of their national response plans for covid19,” and men and citizens must “speak out, report and act against violence against women and girls,” perhaps saving another woman and her children from becoming statistics.

Meanwhile, at the end of this sentence, please stay with me for a moment of stillness, silence and sadness, for loss of words, for Tenil Cupid, just 23 years old, and taken too soon.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. June 16, 2020.

Post 379.

When a woman experiences partner violence, her neighbours, friends and family can report even if she does not. Often, neighbours and families witness or experience violence or its threat because of their relationship or proximity to a victim. The more we all report is the more we empower police to respond and can hold them accountable for doing so.  

Reports of domestic violence do not require women to seek a protection order to ensure their safety. Threats and violence by partners and relatives are also criminal offenses, and police can immediately investigate and charge perpetrators.  

As the Coalition Against Domestic Violence has stated, “It is time that the police develop and implement a zero tolerance policy for domestic violence. If a serious offense has been committed or is threatened, the police must act independently, whether the victim cooperates or not”. 

Proposed amendments to the Domestic Violence Act include provisions for undertaking risk assessments. Upon reports being made, a risk assessment should be undertaken so that police can predict whether lethal harm is likely. A protocol should then be in place which connects with the courts, psychiatric intervention, and social services.  Police should also check perpetrators’ history of violence.

As Conflict Women’s recent press release reminded, Michael Maynard was charged with rape and released on bail in 2018. In February this year, after a history of violence, he killed his 8-year old daughter, Makeisha.  In response to a report by her mother, police were willing to go with Tricia Ramsaran-Ramdass to remove her belongings from the house. The TTPS press release states, “She never did, but instead, moved back into the same home with her spouse until her death on June 9^th”. 

Perpetrators, not victims, should be removed from a home. Nonetheless, we must keep in mind that leaving a home does not guarantee that violence will end. Women are at greater risk when they begin to leave or have left, and threats and intimidation continue long after they attempt to end relationships. 

In the case of Tricia Ramsaran-Ramdass, she was fearful of a partner who killed one woman already. It had been years of torture. Her family was also vulnerable. Such terror can lead women to return to abusive partners repeatedly. 

Love, hope, forgiveness, guilt, loss of self and self-blame are always enmeshed in such decisions, but such complexity should never distract from the fact that responsibility for violence always lies with the perpetrator and, in many cases, his controlling practices, his beliefs in traditional gender roles and male dominance, his history of witnessing, experiencing or expressing violence, and triggers such as substance abuse.  

The proposed amendments also allow police to seek emergency protection orders electronically through judicial officers, enabling them to be granted quickly. They allow Interim Orders to be granted after the second hearing where adjournments are being sought by the court and/or respondent.  In 2017-2018, over one-third of more than 9000 applications were dismissed, 72% of adjournments were related to the unavailability of the magistrate, and only 29% resulted in a protection order. 

The amendments address the needs of victims who appear repeatedly at court and leave without even protection on paper. Expanded beyond cohabitation and marriage, the amended legislation will enable some persons in visiting and dating relationships to seek protection orders.

There are expanded protections for children, including those who are witnesses to domestic violence. Mandatory reporting to police is now required if domestic violence is being perpetrated against vulnerable groups, such as the elderly or persons with disabilities. Such reports should also be able to be made to the Division of Family Services and Children’s Authority. 

The Alliance for State Action to End Gender-based Violence, comprising over 20 civil society organisations, including The UWI, continues to call for the amendments to protect all persons who experience violence in a domestic context, regardless of family status or gender. To continue to exclude some from protection is to define who can share domestic space or have relationships. That is not the point of the DV Act. It should provide protection without discrimination. 

My condolences to the family of Tricia Ramsaran-Ramdass, 37 years old and mother of one. We should all commit to preventing such violence in whatever way we can. These amendments will be debated in Parliament next week.

The GBV Unit and Special Victims Department are important, but as yet underfunded, steps in the right direction. Where police and judiciary can improve, the only headlines should be about how much is possible and how soon.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 28, 2020.

Post 360.

In the wake of the murder of Naiee Singh, Gabriella Du Barry, Pollyann Khan (and her family) and Jezelle Phillip, it’s important to counter misinformation.

First, men’s rights representatives have been spreading misguided analyses that create public confusion. Postings on their Facebook page repeatedly highlight videos of women physically beating men and loudly quarrelling with them to emphasise “the drama, the trauma, the stress, the pressure, the abuse, the patience exercised, the humility applied” by men, which – the argument goes – no one sees when focus is on femicide.

Amidst poverty and depression, men’s rights representatives’ position is that men turn to murder because “when they getting home is stress again”. Media portrays the man as the “bad guy” and the woman the victim, but, according to them, it’s really the opposite – men’s killing of women is merely a “reaction” to the wrongs which broke their stability. Thus, men’s rights advocates’ essential message is that women are toxic and men behave as they do because they suffered silently and invisibly while women destroy them through abuse, infidelity and the courts.

Their key recommendation is that “better behaviour” by both wives and husbands needs to be created to stop the lethal stabbing, shooting and beating of women by their partners and ex-partners. This language echoes the AG’s statement a few weeks earlier that, “it’s true to say that both sexes have trouble with rejection”. It also reflects state agencies’ apolitical attention to “family violence”, an apparently gender-neutral problem perpetrated by both women and men with equivalent frequency and severity.

All these create resounding lack of clarity. The murders of women this year alone show us why. In contrast to the argument of provocation being spuriously promoted, none of these women was having an argument, being violent or abusing the men who killed them. They were only attempting to get up in the morning, go to work and move on.

Posting videos of women being violent to their partners when women are being slain for the crime of merely wanting to live their lives not only shows disturbing lack of compassion, it also dangerously misleads. It excuses homicide by men on the basis of supposed relationship conflict between women and men. It fails to concede that women have no responsibility for a partner capable of premeditated killing in cold blood.

Second, it is statistically untrue to say that both sexes respond to “rejection” with deadly violence , so why erase the fact that homicidal responses are deeply connected to widely shared ideals of masculine authority, control and power? These very ideals fuel men’s killing of other men by the hundreds per year. Indeed, male suicide, male partner violence, and violence among men form a well-established “triad of violence” grounded in these ideals.

Therefore, men’s killing of women is not a response to relationship rejection. These women endured and escaped chronic threat and abuse, in forms which are criminal offences. They didn’t “jilt” a lover. They rejected terror and harm. They left a crime scene. Call it for what it is.

Women can be violent and both partners in relationships must choose to resolve conflict and communicate in non-violent ways, particularly if there are children who will suffer the inter-generational trauma of witnessing abuse between adults.

However, the killing of women, just like rape and sexual assault by male non-partners (affecting one in ten women) and like male sexual abuse of girls (affecting one in five women) will not end because of women’s improved behaviour. Express’ Tuesday headline, “She was the perfect wife” should convince us of that. It should also remind us of the risks of public confusion such that, even in death, the media reckoned with the extent to which Naiee Singh was or was not at fault.

We need men in a broad national effort to stop men’s killing of women. We don’t need men to enter a well-informed, global movement to oppose, simplify or sound clever in ways which, somehow, women never thought of all this time. There’s a reason for the focus on perpetration rather than mainly telling victims to leave. There’s a reason for attention on transforming masculinity and power and not only addressing emotions and mental health. Poverty, depression and suicidal feelings are all triggers of men’s violence against women, but they are not the cause. There’s a reason martial arts isn’t a national solution. Such murder has no excuse. The AG, like all men, must simply, unreservedly amplify women’s right to live and leave in peace.

 

 

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 17, 2019

Post 342.

It seems an ability to identify true love will best protect women from murder. It doesn’t matter that women don’t smother or chop themselves, and that the only one responsible for their death, as a result of partner violence, is the man himself.

His responsibility for his own actions is irrelevant. It appears nowhere in the story. We focus on Mary the battered woman, and conversation becomes about her, her choices and her mistakes. In this case, her failure at one thing at which women should be best, which is love.

As Jackson Katz outlines, John kills Mary gets represented as Mary was killed by John. Mary becomes the subject and poor John becomes a passive character with no power who was merely responding to Mary’s provocation or trying to restore a lost sense of order and control or couldn’t help himself when he felt sad and angry or was the victim of Mary’s disrespect when she exercised her right to find a better man.

Then, it simply becomes Mary was killed (because of some mysterious sequence of events for which she holds responsibility). John as the problem, along with the other Johns who cause so much harm and fear that thousands of protection orders are sought each year, becomes invisible entirely. So do the social beliefs and state failures that produce them in the first place. Finally, in the public eye, Mary becomes remembered as an abused woman who got and kept herself in this situation when she should have known better.

John, who killed Mary, escapes analysis and blame. Did he have a history of violence? He did stop her or promise to change when she tried to leave? Did he refuse advice and help? Did he stalk and harass? Did he coldly choose violence and homicide when he didn’t get his way? Why did John feel any right to so dominate another person? Did he also dominate other men or was this a sense of power he only wanted to wield over women?

Shouldn’t John have avoided getting into a relationship or left when he became violent, knowing he was putting a woman and mother he supposedly loved at risk? John chose to show his ultimate control over Mary by killing her. Is it considered a right of manhood to kill those women who men cannot control? These and other questions about domination and violence, and even masculinity, require critical spotlight on John.

Yet, public talk about women’s murder misses this mark. On Monday, an Express piece titled, “Where is Susan’s killer?’, interviewed Susan Ramphal’s brother. He described his sister, mother of a seven-year-old girl at the time of her death, as “unable to identify true love”. Ramphal was being compared to Neisha Cyleane Sanker.

Neisha Sankar, only 20 years old when she had her son, had been preyed on as a teenager by a violent man fifteen years older who became her husband and killer. The Express story on Neisha Sankar, on September 6, 2019, had drawn the quote and headline from her eulogy: “She couldn’t identify true love”. Also drawing from the eulogy, Guardian’s headline added, “Let Cyleane’s life be a lesson”.

A lesson to whom? To Mary or to John? Should some men exercise greater care and responsibility in their relationships? Should all men collectively change the masculine ideals that produce such deaths worldwide? Whose choices and behavior are meant to improve? Our daughters or controlling men? Is the lesson that men are violent, and like the National Security Minister laments, there is nothing we can do?

In a third story, the Express headline, “Fatal Love”, documented the Florida killing of twenty-year-old Kiara Alleyne, mother of a one-year-old girl, at the hands of her partner and baby’s father. She too was trying to leave. Was it Mary’s love that was fatal? Or was it John’s? And, if it was ultimately John’s, is such homicidal behaviour really love at all?

From the press to the Prime Minister who infamously said, “I am not in your bed­room, I am not in your choice of men“, we must stop blaming both women and love for men’s murder of women.

Women die for loving, for standing up for themselves, for staying, for leaving, and for just being. One out of five women in Trinidad and Tobago report one experience of non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Ironically, this is predominantly male violence from men they didn’t even choose.

Make John visible and accountable when women’s murder makes news.