NEIU Professor Brett Stockdill returned from his trip to Guatemala to speak with the university about their issue of domestic violence and what is being done currently to combat it on March 30.
Violence has been embedded into the country’s culture, going back to the civil war, said Stockdill. The past has played a big role in the current manifestation of violence throughout the country, primarily domestic abuse.
A group called Nuevos Horizontes, however, is attempting to give women a new start. They are an agency dedicated to sheltering, caring and supporting women who left their families due to violence. Nuevos Horizontes has seven different groups to the organization such as legal, community service, psychological care, medical care, shelter, childcare and job training. Stockdill visited Guatemala to study, research and volunteer. He spent seven weeks with the group and during his time there, conducted several interviews with the workers there.
“The interview responses parallel some of the tensions within scholars and activism against violence,” said Stockdill . He acquired a diverse range of people for his interviews from ages 20 to 40.
Stockdill mentioned the “Universal Woman” theory, which he described as the equal distribution of violence amongst women has been challenged recently, by the belief that racial and social classifications make up a huge difference.
“There are different ways that different groups of women are affected,” Stockdill said. He also noted the amount of indigenous and low-income women that occupy the shelter. Although violence may not discriminate, there is a pattern that is showing at Nuevos Horizontes.
The patriarchal system of the family plays a major role in Guatemala’s history of domestic violence. Stockdill said, quoting one of the workers of the organization, “Unequal power relationships between men and women are definitely causes.” That the culture has been dominated by patriarchal views and women are led to believe that they are nothing, and will never be anything, has played a defining role. Interviewees attribute the difficulties of living in an abusive relationship to lack of resources, pressure from family to stay in the relationship, and the male-dominated society in which they’re surrounded by a “Culture of Violence.” Many of these women constantly ask themselves, “If I don’t endure violence, how do I feed my children?”
Seeing violence as a universal issue is a common view according to Stockdill. “We just can’t look at domestic violence and relate it solely to gender inequality,” said Stockdill.
The interviewees agreed that it will take much to change the landscape of Guatemala’s future. “We need great effort to change cultural and social problems”