We Will Do It Again

The Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) is pleased to co-host this Roundtable, in collaboration with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Women’s Institute for Alternative Development (WINAD).

The entire CAFRA Regional Committee and membership congratulate WINAD on this bold step.

CAFRA has been associated with WINAD from its inception and has co-hosted a National and a Regional Conference on the Illegal Use of Small Arms in 2002.

The goal of this Roundtable is to “formalize a coalition of civil society actors to envision, plan and implement initiatives to eliminate violent crime and promote peace.

This is a timely move, as the media daily portrays the rivers of tears and blood that return to Mother Earth while cowardly assassins look for their next prey. The context is cause for concern.

Page 9 of NEWSDAY Section A of 9th February 2006, quotes Minister Edward Hart of the Ministry of Gender Affairs as saying that “Male Violence is crippling the Nation”.

The Guardian Newspaper of 29th August, 2006 quotes Minister Fitzgerald Hinds of the Ministry of National Security as saying that “The Government’s strategy for tackling crime includes a policy to remove all illicit firearms from the possession of criminals in the society”.

With reference to Caribbean youth, a World Bank Study done in 2003 revealed, among other things, that –

(a) sexual and physical abuse is high in the Caribbean, and socially acceptable in many Caribbean countries.

(b) the region has the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS outside of Africa.

(c) the incidence of rage among young people is very high – 40% of CARICOM students.

(d) the proportion (20%) of adolescent Caribbean males who carry fire-arms is extremely high. Gang violence is also high.

(e) youth unemployment is especially elevated in some Caribbean countries.

(f) widespread social acceptance of alcohol and marijuana in some Caribbean countries.

These negative outcomes in respect of youth are all linked, and spread through communities, rage expressed more often than not, through a smoking gun!

I give that context to point to the need for a coalition of organizations and individuals to work for peace - When poverty and hunger is eradicated, Literacy and Critical Thinking Established at formal and non-formal levels, Employment through Apprenticeship re-introduced; and Law and Order executed with Justice; when the NGOs are resourced to work in partnership with government and private sector as social partners, illegal arms will be laid down, for there will be no need to ‘put down a work’. Citizens will live in the Utopia of preserving, not destroying life.

As a Regional Women’s Movement, the reality is that while more men use guns and many die, it is women who also get killed, and are grieving for husbands, brothers and sisters who are either dead, disabled or behind prison bars. They are grieving for their fatherless children, and for themselves when prostitution seems the only way to put food into crying mouths.

So the women are about to transform society. In his poem ‘It was the Women’, Elliot Roache writing on the mad Slave Trade and its consequences, insists that “It was the women who restored us”. Indeed it was the women – look at the works of National Heroine Elma Francois to name but one -and in this new dark season of disrespect and plunder, we will do it again!

Nelcia Robinson

Coordinator

CAFRA