By Ian Bethel Bennett

“That man is a dog!” Said without a care in the world for how damning it can be to the people hearing it. We talk about the violence in our communities and blame the boys, the men. They are dogs. They are bad. They are unruly. They “ssk” after every woman they see. They call girls by their body parts and lavish verbal attention on them as they walk by.

At the same time, women talk to men as if they are dumb, stupid and unfeeling. The worst part of this perhaps is the absolute cruelty we lavish on our youth. I wrote a few weeks ago about the way we speak to each other and how that amounts to violence, but I want to explore that a bit more and show how the ways we talk to children about their parents results in deeply ingrained trauma.

This is more keenly seen with young boys and their fathers. Mothers often take great delight in belittling men, especially to their children. Ya pa is a lousy, no-good brute, to use polite parlance. We do not stop to think how that language traumatises children.

Firstly, children look up to their fathers no matter what. This is a fact of life and it is foundational for a great part of their identities. They need some hero and their fathers are often their first heroes. For some boys, their fathers will always be their heroes. Yet mothers, aunts, grandmothers heap damnation on these men and expect the boys to remain unaffected by that scorn. For some girls too, their fathers are their idols. Yet their mothers tell them that their fathers are worthless. The violence and trauma that this inflicts is beyond measure.

Specialists are now discussing how important it is for children to talk after traumatic experiences such as witnessing a murder, rape, a hit and run, a shooting. This is a similar kind of trauma that the child experiences when all the mother does is berate the father or men in general. They grow up with this split between hating their fathers because of what they have heard and idolising them because of who they are to them. No one talks to them about their trauma. No counsellor intervenes to stop them acting out in later life.

Oftentimes, these victims of endless trauma at home become the victims of social violence in the streets. They look for identification with gangs where they find home. Family is extremely important. When families destroy what remnants of family children have left, they are left with few options and so they look beyond the family that has damaged them.

Masculinity is an interesting thing and it is so easily destroyed and so easily built. However, it exists in relation to femininity. It also exists through femininity. If femininity exists in opposition to what is masculine, then women also determine how men view femininity and masculinity. How ironic is it that boys raised in homes where fathers are absent or maligned by their mothers grow up to be exactly that. By destroying their heroes we destroy them.

Why not save the venom for when the child has grown up? He can then better understand and deal with that poison used to kill his love for his father. I focus here mostly on males because it is them who are so utterly devastated, damaged by this trend.

To quote from a study on violence, “badness-honour becomes a means through which status and honour are restored” (Gray 2004). We have denied these youth their identity, in a class and race conscious society, in a context where African-Bahamians are excluded culturally and socially. Gray describes this as a form of “social death”, which echoes Orlando Patterson’s discussion of slavery as a form of social death.

While we turn a blind eye to factors that influence social development, they undergird every aspect of life. Is it coincidence that the majority of single-parent homes are headed by mothers who inculcate into their sons that they are hateful and will be just like their no-good fathers? These are more prevalent in low-income communities.

Gangs are not isolated to poor communities, but they do predominate there. Male social exclusion from the family and from society is a real problem. They, even when they are taught that to be male is bad, reach for their heroes, and define themselves through what has been built as negative. They mould identities that are bad yet bring honour. Gang life fits this.

Where else are they allowed to belong? Where else are they valued? At home they are berated and filled with self-loathing.Can mothers not wait until children are grown to berate the men they idolise? At least then they can understand what is truly at the base of all the poison and not be penned into a negative masculinity defined by lack rather than wholeness.