I did not realize this was weighing so heavily on my mind but the thought just would not leave me alone. It was time to write because “writing for all its initial disorder clarifies and becomes a process of life” (Naipaul, 1967).
My first thought is that I am my mother’s daughter. And for me that is a good thing. But that thought takes me down a rabbit hole. We really are the product of our parents, whether they acknowledge us or not, or whether we know them or not. Who they are is who we are on the inside. If they are good hardworking people with high integrity, we hope that is who we will become. Sometimes that path is easy.
But God forbid if they are evil from the inside. Worse if they know how to put on the public face and behind closed doors they unleash the monster. And children see this unfold, every night, or day. What choice do these children have? How they evolve is dependent on a multiplicity of factors. If they tell, who will believe them. If they tell, someone might say it was their fault. If they don’t tell, what happens to them inside their skin? If only they would stay as children forever. But we grow up. And we become our parents.
What brought me here. Violence. There was a time when corporal punishment was administered in our schools. Suddenly, that was the enemy which had to be vanquished, and after some forty, maybe even fifty years, with the stroke of a pen, and under the Education (Suspension and Abolition of Corporal Punishment) Order – Section 51 (Statutory Instrument 44/2019) .. in force 1 May 2019, it became unlawful to strike a child within the school system.
The violence has not changed its face. As a child I was intrigued by a story that I heard of someone’s uncle who used to beat his wife. The wife would run away, back to the safety of her parents. Always, her father would bring her back. Back to the husband who beat her, because, the father said, her place was with her husband. Even though he beat her. Repeatedly. That story jumped out at me but it is positioned in the 1930s. It is a true story, as much as the story teller and my childhood memory remembers. The story of violence has lived behind closed doors for more than a century.
Covid-19 came and people were forced to stay indoors. In Saint Lucia, the documented cases of violent abuse during Covid-19 are staggering. Post Covid-19 the violence has become emboldened.
Case files are delivered and lost. Report after report flood shelves in government offices but they tell us there is hope. The irony is loud and all of the right words are spoken. “Stepping up the fight against gender-based violence in Saint Lucia” (Unite-Caribbean website) is a project implemented in Saint Lucia from May 2023-April 2025, the fore-runner to the Domestic Violence Act. “In 2022, the Government of Saint Lucia enacted the Domestic Violence Act in response to an alarming social context – one in two English-speaking Caribbean women reported having experienced physical, sexual, economic, and/or emotional violence at the hands of an intimate partner. This law, designed to protect victims and support them through the legal process, entered its implementation phase shortly thereafter.”
Today social media platforms are rife with story after horror story of violent acts against women. I would have been consoled if these were stories. At the very least there would be some respite.
In a Saint Lucia Times (July 2026) article the headline runs, ‘One of the Region’s Highest’: Inside Saint Lucia’s gender-based violence crisis. To quote from the article – “Joint research by UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that women killed by intimate partners often suffer months or years of physical violence, threats, stalking, emotional abuse, or controlling behaviour before they are murdered. The organisations call femicide the [most extreme and preventable form of violence against women]. They say that if families, communities and state institutions step in earlier, lives can be saved.”
This thread is woven deep into our psyche. And we try to explain it away. One of my favourite ones – in father-absent families, women look to men who could be their fathers. I was lucky. My mother was my father. l did not go looking for one. But what about the girl next door who just sees beauty skin deep in the boy next door, who thinks he is a nice guy. That nice guy who, at the slightest provocation, cut her throat; or beat another to an inch of her life; or of another, cut her nipples, pushed a stick into her and dragged her under a fence. If my memory serves me she died. These are just parts of stories I remember from my youth. Stories we talked about before social media caught a fire. Only, today’s stories are no less gruesome or graphic. History repeats itself and we are reborn into trauma. My mother gave birth to daughters. I hear that raising sons is different.
The law must speak on behalf of all of these cases. The law must grow teeth and show mercy where it is required. If the men come from families that cuddle and cannot contain their violent behaviours, what purpose do our families serve? If the law says it is wrong to hit a child in a classroom, who will tell the men that it is wrong to hit and kill a woman? If other men see this violent behavior as a marker for manhood we the women and children are doomed. Our society is doomed. This is a dark time. And the darkest hour is just before dawn. (Thomas Fuller, 1650). How far have we really come as a people? The family is the bedrock of the community. Or so we have been told. If men are the protectors of the family, what hope is there for the family?