http://www.nationnews.com/editorial/290184017300243.php
New York New York – No need to suffer domestic abuse
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Nigel Gittens, a Barbadian attorney in Washington D.C. who once practised law in Massachusetts, was making a point about the fate of his sister Joycelyn Watson, who was killed by her husband in Brooklyn more than two years ago.
His message was straightforward: when a relationship becomes abusive, get out of it, even if means leaving the comfort of your own home.
"Don't stay in the home with an abuser," he advised women after his sister's funeral. "If I had known my sister's situation, I would never have allowed her to agree to live in the same house with him [her husband]."
The attorney hopes his advice will be enough to prevent other women and men from suffering a fate similar to his sister's – death at the hands of someone who says: "If I can't have you, no one else will."
The final chapter in the saga of Joycelyn and Remington Watson was written recently when a New York State Supreme Court judge, Mathew D'Emic, sent the abusive spouse to prison for 18 years after he had pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge in a Brooklyn court. The husband, a soft drink salesman, had beaten his wife to death with a brick in their Brooklyn home in 2005, then stabbed her in the heart.
It was a relationship with a long history of spousal abuse, which the woman had hidden from her close relatives, including her brother. She had even gotten a court order of protection, but it may never have been served on the man, who continued to live in the house, even after divorce proceedings were started.
Familiar case
The case of the West Indian couple has become a familiar one to Charles Hynes, Brooklyn's District Attorney (DA) whose office prosecuted the case.
The DA has established a highly successful domestic abuse prevention programme designed to shield spouses from violence and it offers protection to immigrant women in the country illegally who are often verbally and or physically abused by their partners.
Domestic violence is at epidemic proportions in the West Indian immigrant communities in the city. It isn't difficult to see why. Immigrants from almost every nation in the region have grown up in an atmosphere in which men feel it is okay to beat women.
Peruse any human rights report on the Caribbean, especially the annual document prepared by the United States State Department and sent to the United States Congress, and a hard bit of reality stares you in the face.
Even after strict laws have been enacted to punish wrongdoers and hotlines and counselling programmes established, the scourge remains a fact of everyday life.
But the DA noted that people from the Caribbean aren't alone either as victims or perpetrators. Domestic violence cuts across ethnic and geographic boundaries.
"It's a problem in all groups," Hynes said in an interview in his office some time ago. "We want to make it easier for victims to come forward to get help."
That's what more Caribbean nations need to do: smooth the path for victims, men and women, to come out from the shadows of abuse
so they wouldn't end up as a statistic, much like Watson.
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