Ridicule stops victims from talking

THERE ARE A LOT OF WEAK MEN IN BARBADOS.

That's the conclusion of the chairman of the Men's Education Support Association (MESA) about men who stay in relationships where they are verbally, physically or psychologically abused by their girlfriends or spouses.

He told the SUNDAY SUN he was seeing more and more cases where men, even some members of MESA, were being controlled by the women in their lives.

However, he said, these women only ended up despising them in the long run for putting up with it.

"Some men accept [the abuse meted out to them]. Ironically, when a man does that, the woman really despises him. She hates him because he is weak. She expects him to be firm and to stand up to her.

"In MESA, we have some cases, luckily not too many, where men say they can't come to meetings because their wives say they can't come.

"Or, it is a case where I call a man's home to invite him to a meeting and his wife or woman says he can't come and starts giving me reasons," Boyce disclosed, adding:

"We have some surprisingly weak men in Barbados and the women hate them for it. They call them 'twerps' and twits.

"Women like men who are strong - not to the extent of beating themor anything like that, but they wanta man who would stand up to them and say: 'No, I don't think what you are saying or doing is right.'"

Boyce told the SUNDAY SUN that when he first said a lot of men in Barbados were being abused, people queried it and some even laughed. Now they were becoming believers,he said.

What prevented victims from coming forward was the perceived ridicule, he pointed out.

He said attitudes in law enforcement, bred by a society that believed men could not be abused, stopped victims from reporting the abuse.

"So there are men who have been abused physically and are ashamed to let anyone know.

"The traditional belief is that the man is not supposed to show any kind of emotion. The verbal and physical abuse is very common. A lot of the time, women initiate the violence against men.

"One of our members who was doing some research into physical violence told me that a man told him his wife slapped him inside the supermarket in front of everybody and the member asked him what he did, and his response was that he went outside the supermarket and cried. This is a real case," he said.

Shelter for men

Boyce called on churches to doa lot more in terms of counselling teenagers and young men on relationships and selecting partners so they could avoid becoming victims of abuse by spotting the signs.

"People need to spend more time courting, they are not doing that.As for the signs of an abuser, the man should look out for controlling behaviour; the woman who is going to tell you 'Let me do that, you can't do it', and the woman who tends to put you down.

"The problem is that whena man is tied up with a woman, he worships the ground she walkson. There are some men who were hit before they got married but they think they can change the woman.

"We also have to do more work with the women to get them to understand what damage they are doing," said Boyce, who called for a shelter for abused men.

He said men sometimes called him asking him to suggest a place where they could lay their heads for a night when their partners acted up.

"I think there should be a shelter for abused men if only on the basis of gender equality. Women have somewhere to go when theyare abused. Why not the men?" he reasoned.