The danger of archaic law in the Caribbean where institutional abuse becomes a national norm: A View from Barbados
Marsha Hinds is a post-doctoral fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Guelph, the immediate past president of the National Organization of Women of Barbados and the co-founder of Operation Safe Space. Marsha is a practicing advocate for women and girls in Barbados. Her research interests include the Caribbean intellectual tradition, Caribbean women and girls’ equity and the systemic relics of racial slavery.
On August 1, 2018, I started serving as the deputy chair of the Government Industrial School in Barbados (called the GIS), on the appointment of the Governor General and at the pleasure of the Minister responsible for reformatory schools. I must admit that although by that time I had been working with women and girls’
advocacy for just about 18 years, I did not know much about the school. Every child who grows up in Barbados will get a threat or two about being sent to GIS for being ‘own way’ but the truth is not many people who grow up in middle or upper class Barbados will ever be in danger of interacting with the institution.
The Government Industrial School was opened in 1883, forty-nine years after the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean. The major purpose of the school was to house children who did not have parents or whose parents did not have the means to provide for their children. The Industrial Schools across the Caribbean extracted free labour from children in exchange for shelter and clothing. Flogging was allowed in the schools and researcher Dr. Shani Roper reported in a recent online forum on the topic of “Children in State Care” that records show that Barbados used the most flogging. The early 1900s saw the passage of two pieces of legislation - the Reformatory and Industrial Schools (1926) and the Juvenile Offenders Act (1936). These two pieces of legislation are still what govern the fate of children inside the juvenile justice system in