By Shamar Blunt
The former head of the National Organisation for Women (NOW) has challenged the finding that there has been a rise in domestic violence, suggesting instead the island has been facing an epidemic of abuse within homes for some time now.
Dr Marsha Hinds Myrie was responding to Commissioner of Police Richard Boyce’s report of a considerable increase in domestic abuse incidents. She suggested that the society is not facing up to the reality of the “toxic” way Barbadians deal with each other.
The women’s advocate told Barbados TODAY: “Barbados has been at a crossroads for quite some time now. What we have to do is that we have to become frank and honest about our society [and] where it is we want it to be. On the one hand, we are holding on to a set of toxic, archaic, old relations about how we interact with people, and on the other hand, we want a modern, contemporary, well-run society. The two things cannot exist together.”
Hinds Myrie declared the commissioner’s suggestion of a surge as rhetoric in reaction to society as a whole placing increasing pressure on the police to address the widely known issues.
“I don’t know if it is a rise; I think what is happening is that because of the pressure that is being placed on The Barbados Police Service to pay serious attention to what has traditionally been seen as being soft crime, or maybe because those soft crimes are now escalating in some way to assault and some of the wounding he is talking about, that is now registers with them. I certainly don’t think that it is an increase.
“Those of us who work with family instability and family violence in Barbados know that our society is plagued with family violence and family instability. We have an epidemic of violence that is happening; for a very long time there has been a misalignment in our gender expectations in Barbados, there has been a misalignment in how children now view themselves, how parents still view children, [and] how we view our elderly. So it is not just even intimate partnerships where we are finding these very volatile and unhealthy relationships; it’s across the gamut of family relations in Barbados.”
During The Barbados Police Service’s annual grand conference at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre on Wednesday, Commissioner Boyce revealed a 21 per cent increase in reported domestic violence cases with 572 last year compared to 471 cases in 2022. He noted that the country still lacked an effective family court system and judicial officers with proper training to deal with victims who are often sensitive and traumatised by their circumstances.
Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that much of the violence and deviant behaviours seen within the school system stem from the behaviours children see in the home, Hinds said. She blamed a lack of targeted steps to address historical social shortcomings for violence in schools and workplaces.
“There is definitely a correlation; where these skills are absent and where we are not doing enough to teach these skills, then you are going to see what you are seeing [in the schools],” she said.
“There are some individuals who believe… when we call for comprehensive sex education… that all we are trying to do is make children gay. What we are trying to do is call for a space where we talk about and think about interpersonal relations. Largely because of the advocacy of the alt-right and the church, we have not been able to get strong sexual education and guidance counselling education classes within our school system.”
Hinds Myrie further charged that a lack of support for the Bureau of Gender Affairs has left the organisation ineffective.
“There have been efforts to create government interventions and responses in the past, but those have been very quiet. One of the victims of structural adjustment over the last 15 years in Barbados has been the Bureau of Gender Affairs. The programme that the Bureau of Gender Affairs was supposed to do was important programming that feeds exactly into reducing domestic violence…. It is not effective.
“We need lawmakers that are trained, that are sensitive, that can provide trauma-informed safe services. Outside of that, we also need to understand that this is not an issue of a few miserable women; it is a deep societal issue with a lot of implications.”
