Imagine your girl child has just come home from school, wildly ecstatic. She has just been introduced to computer coding. She also dreams of becoming a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, or lawyer. Her voice now rides on a cloud of hope, strength and determination. She can do it all because that’s what you told her. She imagines a world where she is starting a business or ascending the heights of corporate Barbados or conjuring up a life-changing invention. She perhaps looks at the leader of her country and dreams aloud of the day when she will take her place.
Now imagine the very next day: an armed cabal of men, without firing a shot, takes the reins of government, sends the leader scampering to safety abroad and declares that this and all other daughters’ dreams must be deferred, pending conformity with theocratic law.
That which is unthinkable in our land is the new and immediate reality for the women and girls of Afghanistan. A generation ago when its theocratic government, the Taliban, reigned with terror and give aid and comfort to a sworn enemy of the West, its mullahs, invoking the name of Allah, decreed that a woman’s place was in a home, cloaked in a burqa, aside from and behind her spouse and even her male children. Females were condemned to a life of ignorance, early forced marriage, servility and subjugation to the will of men. School was closed to girls on pain of death.
No one in Barbados can envisage such a life for half of our population because, as the international community has so often trumpeted, the Caribbean gets it when it comes to the education of women and girls. It has long done so, while in other parts of the world, women and girls are compelled to penury and drudgery in a field or factory. Our girls were packed off to school by mothers and grandmothers who were insistent upon their girls’ inalienable right to life, freedom and the pursuit of their destiny through education.
While we rightly recoil with horror at the prospect of a return to a new Dark Ages for women and girls in Afghanistan – despite the convenient public relations bleating on the world media by bearded men representing a government known as much for its brutality as for its hypocrisy – and while we rightly give thanks for the tender mercies of freedom for our women and girls, our work here towards equity and full justice is far from done.
We are not immune to the many indignities meted out to women and girls on a daily basis on the street and it is time that we go beyond the trite phrases of tolerance for the intolerable. For us, it is not schooling our girls that is an issue but the training of our males to reject the thinking that just as the Taliban view the women of Afghanistan, Barbadian women and girls are purely for male gaze, service and pleasure.
The catcalls and wolf whistles that quickly descend into unspeakably vulgar, abusive and threatening language, rob women and girls of an equal right to walk freely, unmolested and undisturbed.
Too many men seem to think they have a divine right to exercise a profane act. They argue fallaciously for women to merely respond cheerfully to their gross conduct and they will be left alone. Men, who enjoy the right to freedom and security in their person, are entitled to a right to be left alone. Our women and girls deserve no less.
What is even more repugnant is the verbal grooming and sexualisation of children. Workmen on construction sites, drivers and conductors of public service vehicles, vendors and salesmen, potential supervisors and employers, boys in short pants and men in suits and many more are all guilty of this barbarism.
Grown-up societies are moving to enact laws against cat-calling. In the UK, Priti Patel, the home secretary, has vowed to crack down on street harassment and protect women, possibly by making cat-calling and wolf-whistling a crime.
She said: “We will continue to look at gaps in existing law and how an offence for sexual harassment could address those.”
Britain’s minister for public safety added: “It is unacceptable that women and girls are still subject to harassment, abuse, and violence, and I do not accept that violence against women and girls is inevitable.”
It is time that Barbados grows up, particularly as it wants to embrace visitors to our land, not merely as brief tourists but working residents.
All too often, public policy is driven more by what tourists claim than by what citizens contend. Yet, here is an opportunity to meet the challenge that both nationals and the international community set before us.
These are not just noises and words; there is an undeniable link between vile thought, verbalised sexual abuse – for that is what it must be called – and the physical violence, abuse and sexual exploitation of women and girls which ultimately all often lead to the taking of human life by a man drunk on his own power and sense of dominance. Is this, too, who we are?
Our sexual harassment legislation, modelled in 1992, has sought to protect women and girls throughout CARICOM states from the menace of marauding employers. We contend that this net of protection must be cast wider.
It is time to first educate so that our men must learn not to violate. This must be followed by the outlawing, once and for all, of speech and ultimately deeds that originated from a culture and era when girls and boys, men and women on this land were chattel nearly two centuries ago.
Our history is one of emerging from darkness and the vile abuse of humanity. In rightly mourning for Afghanistan and fretting for its future, it is perhaps time that we commit ourselves to a better future for our women and girls and to throwing off our own shackles. For what dreams they have may be the great little nation we might yet be.
