GENDER expert Dr Gabrielle Hosein has flatly rejected remarks by St Vincent PM Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who largely blamed attractive women for violent crimes perpetrated by men when he was addressing this week's Caricom symposium on crime as a public health issue.
On Monday, at the symposium at the Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain, Gonsalves opined that some men chose to kill and get easy money by dealing drugs and doing crime.
He said, "Some of them, in order to maintain rank in the community, they get a fascination with guns. They associate with young women – in some cases beautiful young women who are high-maintenance – and they have to rob and steal and kill and deal in drugs in order to maintain them."
Hosein, former head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at UWI, St Augustine, sharply disagreed.
"It is best that we give less attention to the sexist comments of Ralph Gonsalves, and instead focus on symposium contributions that advance our agreement on solutions to crime and violence.
"It is absolutely essential to talk about masculinity, because dominant beliefs socialise boys and men to associate violence and crime with manhood and power. As scholars have long pointed out, bad is cool."
She said in some quarters it was considered manly to be part of a gang, able to live off successful criminal activities rather than a low-income or low-status job, perpetrate violence with impunity, own or carry a weapon, outsmart the police, and make others fear, and therefore respect you.
"Masculinity alone does not explain why men are involved in gangs, trafficking, theft and multiple forms of sexual and domestic violence, but it does explain why men, rather than women, are the sex that poses a threat to society in the ways that they are."
Hosein said men must be held responsible for the choices they make, while offering them options like employment, mandatory perpetrator-counselling programmes, prison reform, reduction of family violence and gang interruption.
"Boys begin to access guns by 13 years old. That is not because of supposed high-maintenance women; it is because masculine socialisation makes this a way to belong, get protection, and feel a sense of manhood as one grows."
Hosein said this was particularly so for subordinated and poor groups of men without economic power for whom crime and violence become accessible means of establishing safety, wealth and status by the standards of other men around them.
"Masculinity is not a stand-alone factor, but it is essential and our current norms of masculinity must be transformed.
"We need to move away from blaming women for what men do."
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