Understanding Domestic Violence in the Caribbean through Decolonial Lens: Decolonizing Domestic Violence

Abstract

Current scholarship on domestic violence in the Caribbean is authored through colonial lens. This approach is facilitated and continued through a paucity of research examining the historical antecedents of domestic violence in the region. This dearth of scholarly literature on the antecedents of domestic violence in the region enables the narrative that Caribbean residents are naturally violent in intimate relationships. However, this viewpoint fails to grasp the history of violence perpetrated upon Caribbean peoples by their former colonial masters and which is argued to be the precursor to domestic violence in the Caribbean today. The author of this article argues that violence in intimate settings in the Caribbean has it genesis in colonialism and should be critically analyzed using decolonial lens, however, this is a sensitive and difficult intellectual task. This paper presents a decolonial perspective on domestic violence in the Caribbean by deviating from previous ahistoricism and colonial representations of domestic violence. Challenging current accounts, the ownership thesis of violence is used to explain domestic violence in the Caribbean as a vestige of colonialism where violence was used to enforce ownership and control indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans who they treated as property in the colonial era. The intergenerational transmission hypothesis is also used to explain how domestic violence was transmitted from the colonial period to modern-day Caribbean peoples.