What's next after Black Friday?

By Eulalee Thompson

Tackling sexual violence

'Black Friday', the symbolic islandwide protest last week, was an important first step towards tackling sexual violence here. Now what's next? Maybe try these three suggestions:

1. Approach rape and sexual violence as a public-health problem. We know of the excellent work of public-health specialists such as Dr Elizabeth Ward and team in the Violence Prevention Alliance Jamaica (VPA).

The VPA is a systematic and coordinated approach to violence prevention, launched since November 2004.

It brings together governmental, non-governmental, private and community organisations in crime-prevention issues.

That mechanism is already in place, so let's pull more on its body of work and methodology to deal with sexual violence.

The VPA's work doesn't take place in isolation but is part of a global approach to violence triggered by the World Health Organisation's World Report on Violence.

So other agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control speak of a four-step approach to tackling public-health problems such as sexual violence:

• Define the problem
• Identify risk and protective factors
• Develop and test prevention strategies
• Assure widespread adoption

The ultimate goal is to stop sexual violence before it begins. Public-health approach focuses on root causes of violence and offers more services to victims.

2. Learn more about rapists. As referenced by Dr Wendel Abel in his article, 'In the mind of a rapist', published in this issue, about 50 per cent of serial rapists have psychopathic traits. The mental-health community knows quite a bit about persons with antisocial-personality disorder, sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths. They exhibit an abnormal and destructive way of thinking, relating to others and in perceiving situations.

Persons with psychopathic tendencies show no regard for the rights of others, and for issues of right and wrong, have no conscience or sense of remorse for their antisocial acts and do not take responsibility for their actions.

It is believed that psychopaths did not learn empathy early in life and had early parental-attachment issues. Personality disorders are difficult to treat but it is believed that when caught early in life, the outcome is improved.

3.Change the context of violence. Jamaica's history of chattel slavery indicates that this has always been a highly sexually charged context, with wanton sexual violence against women and children. The text In Miserable Slavery by legendary historian Douglas Hall, fully chronicles this side of our history in exposing the life of Thomas Thistle-wood, a white small penkeeper on a plantation in the mid-18th century.

Pattterns of thinking and behaving didn't just miraculously end with the system of slavery, but continue to pass from generations to generations in the collective unconscious and in the cultural patterns.

To solve our problem we have to understand our historical context of violence, sex and power. It makes no sense to continue to say that these are new problems and "what is happening to young people nowadays". That's like an urban myth.

The highly charged sexually context continues in the entertainment. Women are objectified as various body parts and women themselves are objectifying themselves.

The problem with seeing women as objects is that it dehumanises them since they are not seen as complete human beings who can think and feel pain and hurt. And, after all an object can just be used and tossed aside.

Eulalee Thompson is freelance health editor and a therapist and counsellor in private practice. Email eulalee.thompson@gleanerjm.com.