Murdering women because they are women
THE ARREST of former Member of Parliament Jolyan Silvera on suspicion that he murdered his wife, Melissa, may be the current nine-day wonder in Jamaica. Although the average person is desensitised to everyday threats to citizen security, not everyone is so numb that they cannot feel outrage at this development.
Similarly, the contract killing of Tonia McDonald, for which her former husband, Everton ‘Beachy Stout’ McDonald and his co-accused Oscar Barnes are on trial, also demonstrates that women are at risk of being killed by their intimate partners. Beachy Stout is also suspected of killing his first wife, Merlene.
When women are involved with partners whose jobs or status afford them access to weapons of human destruction, they need to know that this exposes them to deadly danger. Of course, the easy availability of illegal weapons begs the question that the threat is quite common for a large swath of the population.
Violence against women and girls is so universal that the European Union and the United Nations created the Spotlight Initiative to address this problem. The crime of femicide, the murder of women, because they are women, has skyrocketed in Jamaica over the past decade. The impetus of men to kill women, whether they are intimate partners, strangers or a “hit job”, poses a clear and present danger for the women targeted and the wider society.
CAMPAIGN
Following the Black Lives Matter advocacy, we could have our own “Say her Name” hashtag campaign to memorialise the many women who have fallen victim of femicide. Melissa Silvera and Tonia McDonald are among a host of femicide victims, too many to identify. In picking out a few of the publicized cases, it is significant to note that several perpetrators were employed in the security forces, giving them easy access to deadly weapons.
Lincoln McKoy, a cop who shot his girlfriend, Jessica King, at the Errol Flynn Marina in Port Antonio, was convicted of murder, though he shot himself twice in the head, he did not die. Paul Martin, a security guard, killed his common-law wife of 18 years, Collette Hibbert; Martin shot her six times then shot himself.
Sergeant John Williams, formerly of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), killed his common-law wife, Gail Anderson. Christina Dawkins, a former student of the University of Technology Jamaica, was killed by her common-law husband, Junior Wallace, a lance corporal with the JDF. Davian Thompson, a policeman, fatally shot Latoya Campbell-Thompson at their home, a day before her 28th birthday. He then shot and killed himself.
The killing of women by their spouses strikes harshly at the heart of all that is fair and decent. Beyond the monotonous regularity with which men are murdered, resulting in war-like annual figures per capita, the spate of killing of women and children is also of grave concern. It is past time to take stock of the values and attitudes that have been allowed to slide, unchecked, for far too long. While we reel in shock from one murder case to the next, we also need to face the harsh reality that the factors that facilitate femicide are intricately stitched into the social fabric.
Femicide is usually preceded by repetitive acts of domestic violence. Critics therefore question why women stay in such abusive unions. Learned helplessness is often a strong feature of such entanglements. Speculation is also rife that the material benefits that some women derive blind them to the dangers and the ultimate price they may pay for partnering with such protagonists of abuse.
FILLS POWER VACUUM
Even in visiting unions, men are typecast as the breadwinners and woman as materially dependent. Violence along its diverse spectrum, often fills the power vacuum when women’s wants and needs cannot correspond to men’s access to the means to meet those demands. Anecdotal evidence suggests that such binary transactions often influence same-sex relations.
At the bottom line however, women are not to be blamed for men’s acts of violence against them. The real problem is that every institution of socialization, including the household, community, religion, education, popular culture and the relations of production, coalesce around the framing of women as men’s possessions.
When a man says “my woman” and translates that misplaced perception of ownership into violence, this is the culmination of entrenched psychosocial, socio-economic and cultural programming. However, no-one has the right to abuse another person. The state and its apparatuses should act intentionally to ensure that this erroneous gender-power norm, which empowers perpetrators of violence, is dismantled.
The beliefs that men have control rights over women and are superior are common across cultures. In Christianity, for example, St Paul’s teachings are very influential. The Pauline principle suggests that God is the head of man and that man is the head of woman. Patriarchal concepts also characterise capitalist arrangements, which identify public spheres as masculine and private spaces as feminine.
Yet, even in the “private” domain of sexual relations, it is widely assumed that men have a right to sex-on-demand. In a landmark regional pushback against this gender power regime, Trinidad and Tobago is outstanding for its famous Clause 15 legislation, which addresses rape in intimate partnerships as a crime.
Patriarchal belief systems often prevent women from breaking through the so-called “glass ceiling” of the business world. Genderspecific notions about power also explain why women remain the numerical minority in politics. Despite women’s full-bloodied participation in the world of work, many people still maintain that “it’s a man’s world.” Ultimately, these asymmetrical socio-economic transactions fuel practices of gender inequality and reinforce an entrenched apparatus of violence.
The People’s National Party in which Silvera served as member of parliament may be shrinking from this washing of its dirty linen in public. However, it is important that they, and the other side, the Jamaica Labour Party, should assume collective responsibility for Jamaica’s prolonged nightmare of deadly partisan hostilities.
The party machineries could have stopped the bloodletting rooted in political divisions decades ago. Today’s senseless killing syndrome, typecast as intergenerational gang feuds are the inelegant offspring of the divisive style of governance and opposition practised by successive governing administrations. The parties should now search for mechanisms of healing and change, thereby leading by improved example.
Correcting flawed self-identity perceptions, corruption and moral decay requires the application of sustained social re-engineering mechanisms. In this sense, we can now fully understand what Bob Marley meant when he sang total destruction [of the prevailing social dis-order] is the only solution. It should be all hands on deck to re-learn social equity in gender relations. Rebuilding a social order based on emancipated self-identities and respect for difference must become a pivotal mantra in all walks of life.