Youth in Focus- "Rethinking the Gendered Nature of Indiscipline"

I’ve been asked this morning to guide us along some considerations on the gendered nature of indiscipline. However before we get there I want us to have a shared understanding of what we mean when we say indiscipline, because I want us to consider a different approach to the way we address the question of ‘indiscipline.’

It can sometimes be helpful to draw on our cultural representations to help us understand ourselves. Our folklore is no exception, since as folklore is really legend or myth, which tells us about who we perceive ourselves to be. By coming out of our collective self they prefigure us. So I want to frame the discussion drawing on the image of the ‘douen’- that character, a child who has died before baptism, with its feet turned backwards, head not only turned front but according to linguist Richard Allsop is covered over with a huge hat so though facing front it cannot be seen and cannot see.

So imagine, if you will, the sense of disconnect that exists between the feet and the head. Imagine, if you will, the head that faces front but has no vision because the eyes are blocked out and imagine, if you will, a covered head so that the face, the person who really is there remains a specter, someone who cannot be seen.

I want you to use these images that you should now have in your mind as a way of speaking to the limitations of our ‘policy’, our popular ideas of what constitutes ‘indiscipline’ and the impact of these approaches on young people.

At present many of the discussions that we hear around the question of indiscipline remains very behavioralist. By that I mean that the popular and wide spread understanding of ‘indiscipline’ is such that it focuses on a young person’s behaviour or attitude and as such what must be done by way of behavior modification when we encounter ‘bad’ or deviant behaviour. Within this framework what is bad or ‘deviant is often measured and determined by the level of social inconvenience produced e.g. twenty boys throw bottles, 1400 parents outraged, teachers are afraid to go to class and the nation becomes concerned about what is happening in our schools. Teenage girls are having sex with taxi conductors, and the social inconvenience and outrage that we hear, in both popular and policy related discussions, all seem linked to ideas of the moral decay of young women, their contemporary licentiousness and promiscuity. Rival gang descends on schools, beats boy, stabs him to death and the police are dispatched as a strategy of containment. What we have presently is behaviour modification by management. Such a behavior-oriented approached, driven by an interest to minimize social inconvenience rather than the young man or woman takes us back to our ‘douen’ analogy of the child in the forest, whose face and whose identity cannot be seen.

In search of a more person oriented approach I think it useful to consider feminist philosopher Martha Nusbaum’s human capabilities approach. Nussbaum identifies the capabilities approach as “what people are actually able to do and to be – in a way informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being.’ I want to emphasize in this definition Nussbaum’s concentration on “”what people are actually able to do and a life that is worthy of dignity.”

In such an approach each of the very real life examples that I identified earlier, will of course continue to exist. However the focus of our attention, the thing that boosts us into action and guides our performance as policy makers, social workers, police officers, and journalists, is the well being of the young people involved. Within the capabilities approach people particularly those who are vulnerable in different ways, and here I include, certain categories of men and women, young men and women, the poor, the disabled become the raison d’etre of our ministries, policies, projects and work plans. These systems become ‘person-responsive’ rather than ‘paper-bound’.

This may appear rather obvious but in reality it is a quantum leap that requires a complete reformulation of how we presently engage young people. The approach does not change the chronic problems that face us, it does however enhance our understanding of the problem and our capacity to respond to the person at the heart of the crisis. So if we return to the two components of Nussbaums capability approach ‘what people are actually able to do and to be’ and life that is worthy of dignity’ then at the most fundamental level of our understanding, indiscipline is measured and understood in terms of how the present circumstances or scenarios be it sex in maxis, or gang related violence limits our young people’s capacity to do and to be, to achieve their potential. What happens if our understanding of ‘deviance’ becomes that which causes our young men and women to deviate from achieving their full potential, rather than our present understanding as a deviation from societal norms?

As I said it is a quantum leap from where we exist presently. We only need to look at our responses to certain crises to see the qualitative differences.

When a situation arises in a school, teachers afraid to go into their classes and our first line of defense and I do say ‘defense’ deliberately is to send in the police then I know that we are not taking a capabilities approach but rather a behaviouralist approach. Why do I say this? (By the way I am not suggesting that the police are not important) but when we militarize our school zones, when we put our young people down we militarize our schools, we turn the school space into one where we criminalize those who may be at risk and we place the rest under a siege mentality (And yes if they have weapons or illegal substances it is a matter that must be addressed but I want us to understand the substantive element of the problem). We have to be reminded that when teachers are required to function as turn keys and security guards they are being asked to approach their wards in ways that I hope conflict deeply with their teacher training. This ad hoc disjointed approach reminds us again of the douen imagery with its face forward and feet backward and the subsequent immobility that results.

A capabilities approach, i.e. one that focuses on people’s capabilities would encourage us takes a holistic approach and since we are concerned with well being then it forces a multi-skilled, team driven approach of appropriately trained social workers, psychologists, welfare officers, community based officers to ensure that all the students are able to realize their capacity to be and to do. When schools become militarized in response to indiscipline, rather than containing what we name as indiscipline we are actually creating a space for the harvesting of criminal activities and mentality.

The failure of such a crisis management approach is further evidence that behavior is in fact not modified and that in reality what obtains are repeat offenders, over burdened teachers, anxious peers and consequently an unsettled learning environment. Primarily because a crisis management approach centralizes the problem without a sufficiently clear distinction between the problem and the person. In a crisis management approach the problem and the person become co-terminous. What then are the gendered implications of such an approach?

Well first of all what is this word ‘gender?’ Gender is a multifaceted concept and unfortunately the kind of definition that we hear most often is actually the most incorrect, that is the one that simply suggests to us that we now need to look at men and women and this is often means numerically counting bodies. I won’t give you a text-book definition but rather give you three of the ways in which gender should be understood by applying it immediately to our discussion on what constitutes indiscipline.

The first way of thinking about gender that may be useful to our discussion on ‘indiscipline’ is that ‘gender’ reflects how we understand ourselves to be masculine and feminine. One of the things that we must considered is the ways in which for many young boys, violent activity is deeply tied-up in their understanding of what it means to be a man. This extends to rivalry among peers about superior masculinity ‘who more dread,’ to various forms of risk-taking. “Risk-taking, I’m using to refer to petty offences with possible reward or remuneration e.g. theft, sex for money, shop lifting. Risk taking should not only be associated with a sense of machismo or bravado of masculinity but may also result from some of the domestic expectations that adults may have of young men and women to assist financially in the household in terms of providing or ‘making ends meet.’

Risk taking activity must also be placed in the context of peer approval and group acceptance for young men and women. What I mean by this is that clothes and how we self-present in and by what we wear makes very important statements about who we perceive ourselves to be as men and women and as young women and young men. Within our heavily market-driven economy of consumption, a number of very expensive brand name products are now part of the battalion of images that are now necessary to reflect the right type of masculinity and femininity because clothes, shoes and style are now all minutely coded to convey adolescent cool points. However, forms of risk-taking are often required to facilitate and reflect aspects of adolescent masculinity and femininity that bring acceptance among one’s peers. So part of our agenda must be to ascertain how certain risk-taking behaviour is linked to an adolescent assertion of masculinity and femininity.

Gender must also be understood as an analysis of power relations between and among women and men as well as an analysis of the systems, practices and beliefs that perpetuate these power relations or inequity. A simplified way of thinking about what I’ve just said is essentially who can get away with what and why (this we call privilege) and who can get what and why (this we call resources). The corollary of this of course who cannot get away with x and why and similarly who has no access to x and why not.

Gender related privilege and access to social resources are acutely seen by our very determination of what should count as an indisciplined act for some and not for others. The question of gender based privilege and resources are clearly seen if we ask why it is, for example that sexually related activities and behaviors are so readily identified as feminized examples of ‘indiscipline.’ Some of the ways in which we hear and see sexual activity as being coded as a form of feminized indiscipline is via every day speech and the consternation that we hear around how young girls dress, the fact that they are sexually active and further rage that they are sexually active with adult men. This preoccupation with young women’s sexuality in our every day speech is a form of policing young women bodies, keeping them in their place in a way that adolescent boys are not. In other words young boys have the privilege of having consensual sex as often as they wish, with whom they wish and this is rarely named as indiscipline or deviance.

Which is interesting because it means that even though the capacity for consensual sex has clear legislated age restrictions, socially we give boys the privilege to exercise consent without forcing any form of social sanction. This in itself, poses a problem for how we treat with issues such like HIV/AIDs, that is, how can you distribute condoms if you assume that the person is not, ought not to be sexually active legally? It is also an example of gender-based privilege …who gets to do what and why (privilege).

We go on to praise our young men (and well we should) if such activity is conducted in the context of condom use…it becomes a smart thing to do. To do so in today’s world means that we have, via such endorsement, given them a very important gender based resource- that of life. They are rewarded because socially, our tacit approval and sometimes, forceful encouragement to engage in sexual activity gives them the freedom to consent to sexual activity and if they so choose the power to practice safe sex without recrimination.

Indeed such practices as sociologists Barry Chevannes reminds us are understood and encouraged as a rite of passage in the Caribbean of how young boys learn to be a man and allay all parental concerns about the possibilities of male homosexuality.

The gendered power relations (remember who can get away with what and why and who can do what and why) of such a scenario is evident when the situation is transposed. First female sexual activity in a behaviouralist approach is always already ‘deviant behaviour’ for young women. Think of the public/social outrage as I mention earlier that pertains to young women’s dress, sex with adult males, or possible assault to young girls after having gone to a boyfriend’s or man’s home. These scenarios all evoke questions such as ‘why did she go there in the first place? The irony of it is that the ‘deviant’ is seen primarily as the young woman because socially we have already written young boys (and men) an almost blank cheque to engage in sexual activity. The only thing that young women seem to consent to when they engage in sexual activity is blame by virtue of having circumvented traditional gender norms the consequences then become theirs to carry. So somehow it never seems to enter our collective imagination that there are a number of social pressures on women to prove their fertility and for every teenage pregnancy that goes to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, or POS/San Fernando General, or Jubilee hospital that there is a male, be he adult or adolescent who has engaged in sexual activity with a minor. Because there are no reporting procedures or regulations, no agency or agent to respond and because of the systems general inability to respond to this fact, this is one of the ways in which we maintain male sexual privilege because the male remains hidden from public scrutiny while culpability is cast upon the young women who as we say ‘playing woman.’

It is interesting, isn’t it, that the young man’s engagement with sexual activity is ‘learning to be a man’ while in local parlance the young girl is seen to be ‘playing woman’ suggesting a) not really having the capacity to consent because she’s not quite an adult and b) since she has the temerity to engage in adult activity, she should be called upon to face the consequences.

Consequently, because we have given ourselves no room to envision an adolescent female sexuality because it is always already deviant we deny our young women the privilege of choice and by extension we compromise the kinds of sexual resources that they can have access to e.g. family planning information, sex education, a future if expelled, and importantly the preservation of life and well-being because we have named young women’s curiosity, practice and desire as deviant a form of indiscipline. Think of a young woman that is presently part of your domestic space (daughter, niece, etc) and simply lay hold of the first response that comes to your head at the end if I say to you that she went to her boyfriend’s house and carried a condom with her. Some of you may think (I hope) well at least she had a condom. I somehow suspect that for many of you that sounded more like ‘and you mean she had a condom!’ In this case the exercise of any form of sexual agency is rarely received with praise or encouragement. Sexual agency and protection of life is received with condemnation and this is an example of what we mean by the power relations of gender (who can get away with what and why (privilege) and who has access to what and why (resources).

What is striking is that in the present policy or programmatic approach is our general unwillingness to acknowledge that in Caribbean societies and I would say societies in general, sexual activity plays a very important aspect in our understanding of masculinities and femininities. Approaching this from a position that attempts to correct young women’s ‘deviant’ behaviour becomes unproductive. A capabilities approach however prompts us to think in terms of what does sex activity mean? A capabilities approach does not necessarily get bogged down in the politics of indiscipline but begins to map by virtue of centralizing the person rather than the problem, questions such as what are the range of actions that young men and women are prepared to take because of the importance of sex and sexual activity to adolescent identity as emerging men and women; why are they to be prepared to have sex but not be prepared to take the responsibility of fathering (why is this possible and why not deviant?) Why are they prepared to sleep with men who may hold nothing but fleeting interest in them (why is this possible and why deviant?)

The third understanding of gender is one that speaks to a corrective mechanism of justice. That is to say after having analysed how privilege and resources can be distributed differently among our young men and women and the ways in which this distribution may penalize young men and women in some ways and reward them in others what steps should we take to ensure that they are able ‘to do’ and able ‘to be’.

In this regard gender using a capabilities approach allows us to envision a desperately needed revisioning. Some of which we have touched briefly here this morning:

1. How do we define indiscipline in a way that centralizes the person rather than the problem?
2. How do we critique what we name as indiscipline and the ways that it might reinforce power relations of gender (who can get what and why and who can do what and why)?
3. How do we understand the ways in which what we name as indiscipline is actually deeply embedded and in fact tools that our young people use as part of their assertion of their do actually have an investment in certain kinds of behavior and work with these to harness their gender identities?
4. How do we create systems and institutions that articulate with, or speak to each other so that we do not criminalize our young or ask teachers to become turn keys?
5. What do we need to do in our individual and institutional capacities to reorient the kinds of discussions we have about young people and what implementing mechanisms need to be in place to facilitate this?
6. How can we construct genuinely participatory and interactive approaches in partnership with young people so that we can understand their investments in certain forms of “indisciplined” behaviours and work with them to chart alternative activities that can secure the same need to secure their adolescent subjectivity without the consequences that may deny them a future.

These are the questions I wish to leave you with and the ones that I think we must grapple with if we are to ensure that are young women and men fully realize their capacity to do and to be in ways that respect their dignity and worth.

By Michelle Rowley, Ph. D, UWI, Cave Hill.