CAMERON: Well, Dr. Longmore, how do we hold men accountable for the way they treat us? How do we take charge of ourselves, how do we do that?
DR. LONGMORE: I think it is a reflection of your self-worth and your self-esteem and if you say you are in a relationship with somebody, if you see certain activities and stuff, look, you are not for it, you are not in for it and it is up for you to say, 'Look, I am sure that there is better out there for me' and likewise, if a mother of a son, sees him doing certain things, she should inculcate certain things from now such as opening the door for his sister when they are going into church little things like that. Likewise, the same thing should be done with your husbands and your co-workers. You know, you are walking on the street and somebody says a snide remark, you don't turn around and smile or encourage them, you step up and you say, 'Brethren, I didn't appreciate that you know, if you want to say good morning you say good morning'. It is little things like that we as women should insist on. I think Jamaica critically needs something called a Men's Crisis Centre, because there are so many men out there who need help.
WEBBER: They probably don't know they are in crisis.
DR. LONGMORE: Well, exactly, that is exactly my point. A lot of men actually want help, need help, but they don't know where to go and get it.
NICHOLSON: It is very interesting that in a women's forum, within five minutes we are talking about men.
DR. LONGMORE: It all starts with the family and man and woman make the family.
NICHOLSON: But except women take the responsibility for the change, I am not sure that's realistic or fair, I don't think anything is going to change until men themselves realise that the direction we are going is not benefiting them either.
DR. LONGMORE: But the realisation is going to come from when they realise that women are not accepting their actions.
CROOKS: I am just agreeing a little with what you are saying; we have to know who we are, what we want, what we will stand for, what we will accept, what we will allow to happen to us, we can determine what happens to us and if a man sees that we are serious about who we are, we have self-esteem, we have self-worth, then they will treat us according to how we perceive ourselves and really how we want to be treated.
LESTER: I am responding to Dr. Longmore's comment on the whole thing of knowing yourself and knowing who you are, I think we do that a lot I guess at school, and we try. I guess for some people, it is not as easy. Some women don't have the choice of saying, 'I don't want you here, I don't want you in my house', because when you break it down to the nitty-gritty of it, that's the person who the money is coming from.
Yes, they (some women) are being beaten but still the money is coming from that person and it is not their first choice, but that's the way they survive and it is a kind of cycle that is not so easy to break out of, so I guess they will have to kind of take a look at the legislation of the land and what it offers to us. Okay, let's say she doesn't want his money anymore, but then, where is she going to get the money from?
What are the other alternatives? I mean it's transactional sex and everything, but I don't think half of these people actually probably want to be with the person they are with or they don't want to take what is coming to them, but they just do it. I guess it is a kind of sacrifice and it's a bitter cycle because they probably shouldn't have had this child but they did and they know they have to take care of the child. So the woman keeps on doing things that she probably wouldn't want to do. It's not her first choice but she does it so that she lives to see tomorrow morning basically.
THOMPSON: I think it has a lot to do with communication. I am going back to what you were saying and the whole breakdown of the family and a lot of it is communication and identifying from the very beginning in a relationship, whether it is marriage or non-marriage. This also goes true for speaking to your children and bringing them up. That to me seems to be the root of the problem. If you get these things clear from the beginning, then you know where you are going and then you can follow on them. Sure, you fall down along the way but you must have a sort of structure by which to move and I think that is lacking.
WEBBER: Couple of things I'd like to speak about. First of all, determining how you relate to circumstances. Sometimes, events in your life set you in motion and I know speaking from my own experience. I tend to speak from experiences rather than just theoretical. After several years and quite a few disastrous relationships including my first husband where I sat and I was abused, not necessarily physically, but emotionally I was told I was nothing...
It changed how I saw myself because I thought I was wrong. An experience can shape how you perceive yourself and what you are entitled to and how you should be treated. You have to go through your own healing, because in our society, there is no room for you to even go through that particular healing and deal with that out loud and being accepted whether in your family unit or among your friends so therefore you keep that within and you feel, oh, I am dirty and feel everybody would treat you like you are dirty and then you have to come to your own cross-over.
Second, you mentioned about having a choice; again, I do a lot of work in inner-city communities and I see women who really have very little materially, and have several children by several various men in the community. Sometimes they are in a relationship and the choice that you and I might have... I was able to leave my relationship with my first husband because I said, 'You know what is true, I am feeding you and supporting you and doing everything else, I am paying the mortgage, take your suitcase and go through the door'. I could do that because I was writing my own cheque. Another person probably could not do that then and there, so we need to be very careful about judging other women, and why you stay and why you didn't stay - because trust me it is a whole heap of reasons why you stay until you are ready to go. One of the things we need to do more as women is support other women and reach out to them, because sometimes, you know I know of a woman who had been abused constantly. People saw her coming to work and they found her body out by airport strip but people never said anything because they didn't want to get involved. So it is how we reach out to other women that is important.
GIBBON: I spent several years with my first 'baby-father' with whom I have five children. When I realised that I have to depend on him if I want this, I want that, I have to depend on him and then he started to take advantage of me. But when I stop and realise what was really happening, I said, 'No, I have to get out there, I have to have my own money, as soon as I have my own money then I know he won't take advantage of me.' So I went out, I got myself a job and things were much better. This is it what Jamaican women need to understand. We shouldn't sit home and depend on man to come home and say, 'Here is my cheque, go and change it' because the moment you take that cheque your are owned by him. We have just got to be independent and let the man dem know that we can stand on our own and anytime we can stand on our own, then we won't go through that abusive thing, we have to be independent, women need to be more independent.
DOUGLAS: Again on the workforce thing; in addition to just groups lobbying about what should be done and so on.
I think we have to deal with things as we have it now and the fact is that women are heading households, they are sending children to school, doing things for themselves so they have to be employed, they should be employed and I think in addition to just groups suggesting things, I think the Ministry of Labour should actually step forward and put in place a type of affirmative action, similar to the one in the States. It wouldn't be covering groups based on one's race.
It would be disadvantaged groups, it could be the disabled, it could cover older people and as Mrs. Thompson spoke about directors being men, it could cover that as well, they could come forward and put a very small percentage of who should really I mean everybody is going to be qualified first thing, everybody is going to have similar qualifications but they are going to say out of every 10 you have to hire an old woman, you have to hire maybe a disabled person. I think legislation should be put in place and not just argument after argument.
DR. LONGMORE: Mrs. Douglas, you brought up a different thing but I just wanted to quickly recap on where we were before. My friend from Immaculate, choice is always there and if it is a matter of taking a cheque versus going out there and planting a yam hill and farming and digging, I am going to farm and dig because that is my independence and that is when I control my life and I think one of the main things, apart from men's crisis - don't get me wrong you know, I am fully cognisant of women and our struggles and so forth. This is an example of the power that females coming together, what it can do; it empowers other generations, it empowers and it educates women to take choices and to take options that they would not normally do and it is dependent on people like us here to go out there and encourage other women to do the same. When you are in a situation where you have to be dependent on a man, you don't teach your son the same thing, you can break the cycle at that point and anybody in the ghetto can relate to that because they see the effects of it, if you have five children, the last two, you can do it with those two. Basically, you can't just say this is the only avenue that I have and that is the only path that we are going to follow because the buck has to stop somewhere and the tide changes and that is basically my point.
DUNCAN-SCOTT: I was going to say exactly what Doctor talked about awhile ago. What role do we have as women, what kind of contribution can we make? You know, the thing is that, you know we talk about the Jamaican women and the strength and power of the Jamaican women and when I think about my mother, she was a shining example of that.
She actually brought us up alone because she left daddy when we were very young, she had five children ages one to eight, she did not have a job and she did not have a degree or anything like that but she did what she thought she had to do, she made a choice, a very, very hard choice and you know we struggled. We didn't have any money at that time, that is a fact of life but her life, how it has turned out, is because she really had a vision for her life and she stuck to the values that were true to her, you follow what I am saying and she is not a single example. We have many many Jamaican women who are like that, who have really been able to break through all of the obstacles.
Look out in next week's issue of Flair for more excerpts from this forum.
