Glenda Simms

The enormous impact of the high murder rate on the life circumstances of Jamaican women and their families is coming more and more into focus. This was brought home to the populace in an article carried by a local media house. In this report, the society was shocked into the stark reality that 67 women were murdered in four months. This is an average of approximately 17 women killed in one month.

Perhaps there are those in the society who would say "dat a nuh nutten" and bring forward the numbers to show that many more men and boys are killed each month. However, the murder of women in all societies, including Jamaica, has to be understood as more than a statistical issue.

The extreme violent acts that characterise so many women's lives cannot be explained away by police statistics that have "confirmed that a significant number of the women killed were secondary victims caught between warring gangsters".

Marceline Brown of Woodford Park in Kingston cries openly as she looks at a photograph of her daughter, Latoya Currie, whose body was found in a barrel in Calvary Cemetery, in July 2007. - file

collateral damage

The deaths of women in this undeclared civil war cannot be glossed over by a subtle inference that our mothers and daughters are mere collateral damage in the battle zones of Kingston and St Andrew, St Catherine, Clarendon, St James, and other geographical enclaves of this island.

The authorities need to come to grips with the horrendous ways in which women victims of the national escalating murder rate and general lawlessness are treated at the last moments of their lives.

The most recent dramatic murder surrounds the demise of the 22-year-old cosmetologist Shushana Young, who was reportedly "slaughtered in the busy York Plaza" after a desperate run from her murderer, who finished her off by pumping two shots into her head as she lay helplessly on the ground where she had fallen, in full view of dozens of her fellow citizens.

From the point of view of most women, the issue of the murders of women and girls is certainly not about numbers. The fundamental issue is that women are murdered with a passion that goes beyond the anticipated result of the connection of a bullet to the brain.

This is the passion that is rooted in the dark underbelly of the patriarchal psyche. To understand and appreciate this view in very simple everyday terms, we need to spend a moment to analyse the level of inhumanity associated with the murders of women of all age.

In the current situation of expanding violence both young and older women have to "grovel for their lives" in their final moments.

A recent report in one of the local media houses described the dog-hearted murder that snuffed out the lives of our female citizens who have no choice but to live in fear and squalor in many urban communities.

senior citizens

On the first day of May 2008, the country awoke to the horrific description of the last moments of 68-year-old Marjorie Miles who "grovelled and begged" for her life as gunmen pumped bullets into her body minutes after they murdered her 70-year-old male partner.

On that same night, the news reported that in the same sector of Kingston a 37-year-old woman did not get the chance to beg for her life. She was shot while she slept.

In yet another report, the country was alerted to the fact that dozens of teenagers, most of whom are girls, have disappeared into the underbelly of the Jamaican society. They cannot be found. One of these missing young women was Nickeisha Samuels, whose dismembered body was found stuffed in a hollow tree trunk near her home in Clarks Hill, St Andrew.

sadistic death

This means that young Nickeisha's murderer or murderers were very familiar with the community. No drive-through stranger would have known about a hollow tree trunk that could accommodate or conceal the remains of a woman whose death must have bee most excruciatingly painful and sadistic.

The viciousness and brutality associated with the incidence of violence against women and girls must be seen as a reflection of the misogynistic blueprint of the worst remnants of the patriarchal collective consciousness.

Women continue to be seen and used as sexual objects in spite of their efforts to succeed in the formal educational system: they continue to carry the multiple burdens of the rearing, caring and nurturing of the nation's children and the increasing population of the elderly, and they continue to be socialised in a theological framework that declares that God created the male of the species to rule and to have dominion over all.

Within this framework, the women of the society are forced to validate their womanhood in a sexist, class-based and racist social structure, which punishes in violent ways those who dare to get in the way of the criminal or carnal desires of those men who have no choice but to validate their manhood through the power of the gun or through the perceived power of their penises or their pocketbooks.

This socio-cultural reality reinforces in the minds of disenfranchised men that the woman is the enemy and she must be dealt with in 'manlike' ways even at the moment of her death.

It is incumbent on the decision makers in the public, private and religious sectors to acknowledge that they have been merely paying lip service to the notion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. Because of this, there is no outrage at the brutality that characterise the violence against women in the Jamaican society. Women are therefore seen as mere collateral damage in this undeclared war in our midst.

Glenda P. Simms is a consultant on gender issues. Please send feedback to columns@glenaerjm.com