Psychologist calls for gender neutrality in discussing violence, abuse victims

WESTERN BUREAU:

Clinical psychologist Dr Georgia Rose believes that discussions on interpersonal violence and abuse must seek to erase long-held, gender-based stereotypes on the subject, such as male abuse victims being weak, or women being only victims but not aggressors.

Speaking to The Gleaner on Monday, Rose said that while gender-based violence and abuse of women and children are undeniable global facts, avenues need to be created for deeper conversations on the overall issue.

“We need to have a more fulsome conversation on violence within our society and how it is perpetrated and experienced. Globally, women are more likely to be victimised than men, but we also know that crimes of a certain nature against men and boys, especially sexual crimes, may not be heavily reported, whereas physical violence against men is more commonly reported and therefore may not draw the same amount of sensationalism [as would] when we hear that a female child or a woman has been hurt,” said Rose.

“There is a psychology behind male victimisation, where the narrative exists that, as a man, to identify yourself as a victim of abuse shows a degree of weakness in your character or personality,” Rose continued. “It comes back to victim blaming and shaming, and we have to get to a place where abuse is not gender-specific. Women are more at risk of abuse, but it does not mean that men are not also victimised.”

As an example of how female-on-male violence is treated, Rose pointed to international reports on Monday about French President Emmanuel Macron allegedly being shoved in the face by his wife, Brigitte. That incident, which was caught on video, was subsequently dismissed as a playful gesture between the couple.

“There is a video that is trending about the French president, where his wife is pushing him in his face, very aggressively, and there is a statement which says that they were playing around. But the reality is that, if it were a female and her husband pushed her, the uproar would have been immense,” said Rose. “The norm is that the man is the stronger sex, and the woman is the weaker sex, so the woman is the one more likely to be victimised than to be the perpetrator.”

WARTIME PRINCIPLE

The subject of gender-based violence has gained fresh traction in the Jamaican consciousness following several high-profile reports of attacks on women and girls over the past month.

These include the May 9 murder of nine-year-old St John’s Primary School student, Kelsey Cassidy Ferrigon, whose partially nude body was found in a barrel at her Spanish Town home, as well as the May 13 assault of a nurse in a road rage incident along the Mount Airy main road in St Andrew, and the May 22 abduction and sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl in St Catherine.

Commenting on the issue, social anthropologist Dr Herbert Gayle suggested that while more males are victims of violence annually, violence against women gets more focus because of a wartime principle that urges combatants to leave females alive.

“Since 2000, 80 per cent of the victims of homicide in Jamaica are adult males, while 9.1 per cent are boys, and women make up nine per cent. When a woman is killed, it is time to go to church and pray, and we are a wicked bunch, but the ratio is one to 10, so 10 males would have also been killed during that time,” said Gayle. “The velocity of males killing each other in a war zone is so high that nobody gets emotional. What your DNA is going to say is that you have to preserve the lives of those who can get pregnant and replace those who are killed; so that is why the first principle of war is ‘kill no replicator’.”