Women Weep

Be it the work of the Devil, that upon the maiden launch of the Women’s month calendar which took its centerfold spread in all the major newspapers, the most puerile and malicious display of vindictiveness posed for the evening news.  Degrading, yes, but there has to be more we can do to penetrate the nakedly balls-less betrayal in these complicated psychological games of “last lick”.

Tag! And Tiffara Young was “it”, objectified and alone.  It is an unsettling tale of terrorism and helplessness. What shook me as Ms. Young, with commendable selflessness, exposed the story of her traumatizing exploitation was the seeming impotence of the Women’s Department. I hope what she said was not true about the involvement of that Department.

Thinly veiled by the cover of dark glasses, Tiffara undraped her story, hoping to summon the full force of its prohibitive value, as she broke the silence of her suffering by telling us that “In December we get into a fight and they charged him[“Nigel” who is her ex-common-law] for aggravated assault. He asked me constantly to drop the aggravated assault charge and the maintenance charge against him but I refused to. So on Monday the court case came up and I went to court, he didn’t show up, they went through with it; they fined him $500 by April 15th or six months in prison. He found out that I didn’t drop the charges and he went on the internet and posted me on the internet naked.”

She went on to relay that she sought refuge in the Women’s Department, which cast her aside by basically telling her that there was no room in the inn for her “real life issues”. Allegedly someone there cavalierly and dismissively pointed her to the embattled Police Department and stepped out of the way to continue with the more important decorations of Women’s Month.

Cho! What????? Now, the Women’s Movement has been on a roll with ceremonial flings. I mean in less than a week we have had a lot of noise in the marketplace of muliebrity. When we check our change, however, something is wrong. Really, now, in under five days we have had what we must now condemn as simply glitter: the launch of the Women’s Month Calendar, US Embassy Woman of the year competition, and National Institute of Culture and History hosting a series of activities including modeling, plays and art. But after this glitz and glamour, where is the substance of the struggle for women like Tiffara?

What does it profit the Women’s Department to gain the whole world of pomp and circumstance and lose the souls of the struggle of women in Belize? What about Tiffara and the hundreds of young women being tortured in the same way?

This is a woman whose self-esteem has been brutally assaulted and her privacy publicly raped.  Strong words, you might say, but what is the difference between the emotional and psychological penetration to the hymen of her public dignity and a physical sexual assault? The motivations and the effect of both are exactly the same. This is a power play and an instrument of control that we have not prepared against.   So again where is the women’s movement in all of this? Maybe, at the feast of false images.

My disclaimer is that there is an imperative to be terminally fair to the efforts of the Women Department over the years and we know you can’t believe everything that you see on the news. But this duty of fairness is no immunity for them to hide behind and drop the ball; not when they had so long to get ready.

Thinking back, this issue of the non-consensual posting of nude pictures of young Belizean girls officially was “spammed” as far back as 2008. I can recall the resolved and brave young woman who actually went on the morning talk show circuit and sued a computer repair company that had stolen some risqué shots of her taken by her boyfriend and posted them on the internet.  Nothing was reported further as to the outcome of her campaign and public stance against this sort of exploitation, but this is Belize and we tend to be a “fuss bruk” society when it comes to far reaching issues.

Clandestine websites and Google blog spots are still popular laughing stops for scorned ex’s and malicious females. These sites are no secret, as the “belizeanbabes” and aptly named “Koncas” dot coms, are the staple in public servant offices and after-school gossip rinks. The only resistance has been from a series of females who quietly collared the legal systems of both Belize and the mighty United States to get some relief. One young woman went so far as threatening the administrative host of the blog site for infringement of her privacy rights and the publishing of her image, to which she has sole ownership, without her consent.

So if that happened way back in 2008, what identifiable attempt has the Women’s Department made since then for women like Tiffara, apart from printing banners for two years worth of Women’s Months? The mandate of the women’s department is to further women’s issue in Belize but has there been even lobbying for legislation to deal with this growing cyber environment of cowardly sex offenders?

The only way to neuter the proliferation of this plague is by using laws. Just back in November of last year the Women’s Department put on free legal advice clinics with an impressive lineup of socially conscious lawyers.   You mean no one at the Women’s Department could have picked up a phone and called at least one of those attorneys to loudly take something to court that actually matters for once? How about getting pro-active and having workshops on a legal and policy based solution. That is their job over there after all not a favor to Tiffara.

It cannot be sufficient that all the way to the back of the file 13 law of the Magistrate Court, under the section that deals with “Indecency and Obscenity”, that there is a slap on the wrist criminal offence of “circulation of or traffic in obscene objects”. Look here, under that “sheckreh” piece of law, it says that someone who “for public distribution, or public exhibition, makes or produces …blah blah blah…or in any manner whatever puts into circulation any obscene…print, picture, poster, photograph, cinematograph film or other obscene object” will face the terrible onerous fine of a whopping, get this, two hundred and fifty dollars or a six month stint in Hattieville. Wow.

This is not enough. For women to enjoy the inalienable rights and freedoms of society there has to be more than that “chin chi” straw of legislation. To undress the mischief makers and criminals who crucify these young women. It is going to take more than just sporadic thrusts at the one, one problems that pop up. We need to get at the root. Like the stigma of AIDS and Crime, internet pornography is going nowhere any time soon in Belize. That is for sure. But we have a duty to the young and vulnerable to ensure that we don’t leave them improperly equipped against these kinds of predators in a forum where we have no weapons to fight for them.  Ultimately, we are all on the side of the Women’s Department because something has got to give. Tiffara’s story is a wakeup call that the insurgent splinter cells of abuse and exploitation are still active against women and we must take away their weapons of mass destruction.

| | | | | |