The Reverend Amrela C. Massiah speaking with Lisa Cummins, Executive Director of UWI’s International Consulting Company, at The Women of St. Martin’s Church International Women’s Day Prayer Breakfast at Crane Resort.
“Press for Progress” was the theme for International Women’s Day 2018 and Lisa Cummins, Executive Director for UWI’s International Company also added her voice to the call for women to “Press for Progress’
While speaking at The Women of St. Martin’s Church International Women’s Day Prayer Breakfast held yesterday at the Crane, she identified that even though in Barbados we have come a long way in terms of women advancing, she identified areas of abuse and discrimination that women still grapple with in the society and not only from men but fellow women as well. She suggested, “We need to press for a complete overhaul of our social infrastructure driven by the transforming of our minds.”
Cummins highlighted her own personal experiences, she recounted, “I remember when I was recruited by an International Organisation and was excited about my new journey which was going to take me to Uganda in 2008. I remember the man, followed by a woman, who asked me “who I knew that got that job for me?” because you don’t get those jobs just like that. I didn’t bother to tell him that I was one of hundreds of shortlisted applicants from across the ACP and had been the highest scoring applicant among thousands in the five-year history of the Programme across three regions of the world. How many of you have ever been elevated and had men and women alike spurn your excitement at accomplishment with mutterings like that or comments about who you must have shared “toe shakes” with?
“We see the news stories about runaway girls and we scoff. ‘Which man she shack up wid now?’ we ask dismissively. When a woman is raped, it is often the sound of women’s voices shrieking most loudly complaining about what she was wearing, where she was walking, the length of her skirt or the height of her heels. We, have come so far and we as women are supporting each other more than ever, but we still have the tendency to behave towards each other with societal prejudices and the socialisation of patriarchy and misogyny as badges of honour to shame other women who in most cases have done nothing wrong.”
She continued, “Why is the narrative when a woman is raped about how culpable she is and not about the violence of the perpetrator? Have we considered that the statistics show us that women are 35 per cent more likely to live in poverty than men are and the result is often challenging socio economic circumstances which give rise to challenges like teenage pregnancy?
“I met a young girl who ran away from home for the first time at age 12, by 18 she had three children and by 16 had tried to commit suicide twice. She lived in a home with twelve people in absolute poverty, no one in her family had any kind of qualifications and frustration in a densely packed small urban home gave rise to fights, rage and desperation. This was the story behind this runaway that many of us would try to shame.”
Cummins stressed, “We need to press for social inclusion, access to meaningful and relevant education. We need to ensure that the girl from an inner city community has no fewer real opportunities than the one whose parents occupy our nation’s board rooms and high offices. We need to ensure that our young men see themselves as more than “stags” in a race to conquer and score, and see pride instead in raising strong families. We need to remove the stigma from mental illness by understanding that there is a direct correlation oftentimes between socio-economic challenges and deprivation, and depression and suicide attempts among our young girls. We need to press for better identification mechanisms which avoid the rejection so many of our young girls face because they appear to be ‘problems’.”
She also made the point that abuse comes in all forms, “What about that polished professional career woman who is living a life of terror behind closed doors because she feels she has to keep up appearances and never admit that she is suffering in an abusive relationship? Or the housewife who has never worked outside her home and is financially dependent on an abusive husband and cannot see her way out? What about the children – girls and boys raised in those homes and their future relationships? Will the socialisation of their childhood be generational? We are happy that we no longer have to ask our husbands permission to register a child or to apply for a passport. But the reality is that right here at home, we have significant work still to do on how we see ourselves and how we see other women and girls.”
Cummins highlighted, “International Women’s Day and the celebrations around it, help us to put these multidimensional challenges that women face – women as victims, women as perpetrators – into perspective and interrogate them so that we collectively can effect change. We as women have a
responsibility to lead the way with enlightenment and compassion towards the challenges that other women face…” (NB)