We are creating unbalanced men – UWI experts

WESTERN BUREAU:

Two gender-studies experts aligned to The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Western Jamaica Campus (WJC), are of the view that raising Jamaican boys to conform to a masculine culture that emphasises power and ignores emotional expression will lead young men to embrace gender-based violence as adults.

Dr Patrick Prendergast, campus director at The UWI, Mona-WJC, and co-convener of the Male Action Network initiative, and Carla Moore, UWI gender-studies lecturer, voiced the concern during a recent town-hall meeting on gender-based violence at the Calvary Baptist Church in Montego Bay.

The town-hall meeting was one of the primary events on the agenda of the Jamaica Baptist Union, which staged its 169th General Assembly in Montego Bay last week. The primary focus was on community partnership, which entailed a call to end violence against women.

While addressing the meeting, Prendergast said that children are often raised to accept hegemonic masculinity, which legitimises the dominance of ­powerful men over women and other males as the only standard of manhood, which, in turn, leads to an acceptance of bullying.

“The way we’ve been socialised as boys and girls to accept certain ­definitions of masculinity will impact the way we relate to each other,” said Prendergast. “Unfortunately, when socialisation says that hegemonic masculinity is the accepted form of masculinity and other forms are a no-no, what you have are is low or no reporting of this kind of ­gender-based violence.”

“Why is bullying, for example, not so much of a problem in some spaces?” asked Prendergast. “Because that’s one way of expressing your masculinity, to bully others, and a real man shows his power because to be a man is to be powerful.”

In her presentation, Moore stated that denying boys the right to express their emotions would turn them into ­imbalanced adults.

“We say that men don’t cry, but we don’t understand that we create ‘non-­crying’ men by what we do to little boys. So a little boy drops, he runs to you crying, and you say, ‘Shake it off,’ and there’s no softness, no tenderness,” said Moore. “In 20 years, that’s going to become somebody that women are going to bawl about. We don’t understand that we’re training them out of the type of soft emotions that are necessary to create healthy human beings.”