By Adrian Green From Barbados Nation news

The European Union’s representative in Barbados is “disturbed” that the majority of Barbadians still favour beating children as a way of discipline.

This was the front page story of the DAILY NATION on Thursday, December 17.  The EU ambassador is quoted as saying, “the population possibly has to be led forward a bit.”

Our attitude to corporal punishment disturbs me too. Ambassador Mikael Barford and I may be on the same side of the argument. But powerful Western nations have a habit of “leading” other nations in ways they would never allow themselves to be led, forcing change at a pace they would not accept for themselves.

The ugly scars of our past are very visible and the wounds still fairly fresh.  Societies with broken limbs often use less than ideal crutches to keep them from toppling.  Pulling those crutches away without the necessary therapeutic treatment can be a disaster. The doctor’s creed says, “First do no harm.”  America and Europe have shown that they are willing to do critical harm to other countries in order to “save” them.

We should be careful in passing laws and putting in place measures to address social issues under outside pressure.

Anytime one mentions our social issues, one should put them in context.  One would hope that when he mentioned evidence linking the beating of children to other forms of violence, Ambassador Barford also mentioned evidence linking present day violence to historical and contemporary events and circumstances.

In leading the Caribbean away from corporal punishment, hopefully Europe will lead the way in addressing the imbalances in global politics that add to the stress, desperation and violence in Third World nations.

The European ambassador may be familiar with the psychological trauma inflicted by Europe on persons of African descent. He may have read the work of Dr Joy DeGrut-Leary, who talks about post traumatic slave syndrome.   Soldiers witnessing the horrors and experiencing the stresses of war often develop post traumatic stress syndrome. It prevents them from living normal lives. The families of these individuals suffer along with them. Without intervention, the trauma can be passed on to the children and the children’s children.

Soldiers recovering from the trauma of serving their country in battle should receive counselling and help to ease their transition back into regular society.  

The trauma of living under the brutality of European enslavement and colonisation must have left its mark on those who lived through it and their children as well. On us. Dr Leary calls it post traumatic slave syndrome. It is reflected in the way we relate to our children for example. 

In an interview with Essence Magazine, Dr Leary says: “I’ve seen so many other parents struggle with this, and they had to learn to hug their own children. For some of us, there’s a fear of loving too much, because during slavery there was never any guarantee that families wouldn’t be split apart. In a word, it’s abandonment, abandonment deep down. And so there’s this difficulty that we have in really embracing each other the way we need to, even our own children. It’s similar with praise. The slave master may have noted that the child is “coming along”, but the mother would state his bad qualities – he’s stupid, shiftless, unruly, can’t work – to keep him from being sold. Many of us normalised that pathology and now, even though a parent may be very proud of a child, there is a downplay of praise. That creates children who wonder Am I not good enough? or who are desperate to make their parents proud.”

In the same interview, Dr Gail Wyatt, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, says: “During slavery, to keep their children out of harm’s way, parents tended to be overly punitive. They would punish their children, often with aggression, to keep them in line rather than allow them to be punished by someone else: the master or the overseer. Parents also may have been overly punitive to look powerful to their children to hide the fact that they were powerless. For these reasons, this overly punitive parenting has been perpetrated by families. Though parents of other races punish children physically, many of us grew up in families where corporal punishment was the norm and where even a child’s questioning was often met with a great deal of aggression from parents.”

Former slave holders in Barbados received help from Britain to ease their transition from the sweet days of having access to free labour. Former slaves received no such help or compensation.  The trauma of hundreds of years of inter-generational abuse and bondage was left unattended. 

Maybe Ambassador Barford is truly passionate about the welfare of the children of Barbados and will support the call of Caribbean leaders for reparations so that we can remedy the situation. 

Reparations can be used to fund training for teachers and parents in alternative methods of discipline.  Massive media campaigns could be launched to promote positive social attitudes.  If we could afford to pay more teachers, we could decrease class sizes and ease the stress on educators and students alike.

Funds could also be directed towards research and training in the social sciences. Affording Caribbean social scientists the time and resources to really study our social ills could provide meaningful long-term solutions.  Solutions that European populations could possibly benefit from as well.

Social sciences have taken a hit in the present economic climate. They are seen as less likely to provide students with job opportunities. Reparations from Europe could fund a whole new pioneering generation of Caribbean psychologists, sociologists, economists, artists and historians, the same way our enslavement provided the economic security and foundation for those subjects to flourish in Europe and America.

Hopefully the European Union ambassador will become a great ally in our quest to correct the issues caused by the historical crimes against humanity.

In the meantime let’s pick up the pace of our recovery and self-reparations.

Adrian Green is a creative communications Specialist.

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