Home Features Intimate partner violence and period shaming fuel Yvonne Barrow’s passion for addressing...
By Lakhram Bhagirat
It is said that experiences are integral in shaping our outlook on life as well as fuelling our passion to better shape the experiences of those around us.
It is the experiences in her life that fuel the passion of Yvonne Barrow to address the ills that plague our society today. Glaringly, among those ills is the issue of gender inequality. However, Barrow’s approach is one that is different from the others around her, since her experiences are vastly different.
The 27-year-old sociologist grew up in the East Coast Demerara village of Nabaclis with a strong matriarchal influence. She was surrounded by strong opinionated women who never caved in to societal pressures.
While she drew from the strength of the women around her, Barrow has had her fair share of uphill battles when it came to maturing into the woman she is today. She has been a victim, survivor and now a pillar of strength for many around her. She is a mentor, leader, activist and support system for not only women and young girls, but also for many at-risk boys.
Before one gets into the amazing work Barrow has been doing and plans to continue to do, they have to understand the experiences that led to the young woman choosing to address societal ills.
Like most young adolescent girls, Barrow began experiencing physical changes, including menstruation. However, she realised that her periods were different from those of the women around her, since she would experience excruciating pain to the point where she could not concentrate on anything around her.
She was told that this was normal for some girls. Nevertheless, she felt as though it was not normal and her constant cries of pain coupled with the fact that her father would have to come to take her home from school while she was menstruating led to a lot of teasing from her classmates.
She remembers crying out on account of period pains and persons around her accusing her of having an abortion or attributing her pains to a lack of sexual intercourse all while she was in agony. The shaming, according to her, was never-ending.
“I went to PC (President’s College) and they had a nurse…the painkillers (they gave me) when my period came, those things were like water, they just pass through your system. The relief was minimal. I was in so much pain that I could not concentrate in school, so my father would have to come and collect me most months,” she related.
She recounted visiting a doctor once who told her that she “would grow out the pain”. That left her flabbergasted since she was already a young adult at that time. She would later discover that her menstrual pain was due to her undiagnosed condition called endometriosis.
According to the Mayo Clinic, endometriosis is an often-painful disorder in which tissue similar to the tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus — the endometrium — grows outside the uterus. It most commonly involves the ovaries, fallopian tubes and the tissue lining the pelvis.
While the attempts to normalise her period pain were one part of what fuels her passion for education and advocacy, Barrow explains that the tipping point was the experience of intimate partner violence by herself and women around her along with lack of access to comprehensive sexual reproductive health education that really made her realise that a change was needed.
Highlighting the instances of domestic violence and poor sexual reproductive health education, Barrow recounts that as a teenager she was surrounded by girls who were sexually active as well as in abusive relationships.
“I had close friends that were unaware of safe sex practices and had no idea what to do with a pregnancy. One of my friends was pregnant and she wanted an abortion. Then to get the abortion, she did not know what to do. I was reaching out to a medic at the clinic next to me to get advice, only for the doctor to tell her when she is getting the abortion that she had to come alone. The stigma led to her having an unsafe abortion of a five-month pregnancy. She did that by herself and inserted her own drugs and bought it over the counter. She delivered the dead foetus by herself at home, because her parents would not have accepted her, because she got pregnant out of wedlock,” she related.
“One of my close friends was getting married as a teen, as a result of an arranged marriage, and the fiancé was physically abusive to her. She would turn to me for help and guidance, and I would be listening to every programme to see what sort of support women can get to leave a domestic violence relationship. I would be getting the information and sharing it with her and then when he eventually found that I was sharing information, he isolated her from me. He used to beat that girl and with the stigma and parents’ shame, she still got married to him and that thing left me speechless. At that wedding I didn’t know how to be happy,” Barrow added.
She noted that those experiences all stemmed from societal inequalities as well as the lack of access to the relevant information. The women around her were not even aware that abortions were legal. They were worried about the stigma attached to getting divorced or even leaving their abusive spouses.
Her own experiences of being abused by her partner also made her realise how the issue of domestic violence was “normalised”.
For Barrow, she describes herself as a volunteer at heart and Anglican by choice. She credits much of her leadership and advocacy skills now to her Anglican upbringing and the opportunities that were afforded to her. At the age of 16, she was Secretary of the Guyana Anglican Youth Council, where she was afforded the opportunity to shape herself into the leader she is today.
She now volunteers with SRHR Adventures, where she is instrumental in shedding light on a number of issues – particularly endometriosis.
SRHR Adventures is an initiative that seeks to raise awareness of sexual and reproductive health and rights with a special focus on family planning/contraception in Guyana. It was birthed from the founder Dr Pat Douglas’s love for women’s and girls’ health and rights, a close friend’s encouragement and her countless encounters with women and girls who hadn’t a clue how to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.
Barrow joined the team there in 2017 with the aim of highlighting endometriosis and period shame. Now, she does more than that. She empowers young girls and communities about contraceptives, reproductive rights, and availability and access to services.
Last year, she led the Parushi Club initiative, a mentorship programme, which catered for adolescent girls living in Buxton and Annandale. Members met every Saturday afternoon to discuss matters, such as sexual reproductive health, bullying, and fundamental life skills. It was launched in the village of Buxton and saw the participation of 30 young girls between the ages of 9 and 18 who attended a three-month course where they gained knowledge to better position themselves in society.
Away from her work with SRHR Adventures, Barrow has partnered with Leota King to create a programme called Protect Your Peace, which works with male juveniles at the Sophia Juvenile Centre. The programme was extended after the duo won the Commonwealth Peace Award in 2018 and received a grant to fund their activities.
The programme had initially begun in 2017 at the Sophia Detention Centre and after winning the grant they decided to expand it to better support the boys. The motto for Protect Your Peace is “Reach, teach and restore” whereby they provide social and vocational activities or programmes for the boys at the Centre. Thus far, they have trained them to be barbers, partnered with the Guyana Football Federation and have had capacity building sessions whereby the boys can be empowered about things like toxic masculinity, conflict and anger management as well as learn a skill in the process.
“Protect Your Peace is my personal project. It is dear to me because I want to always put my work when it comes to gender equality and social development with the touch of men with it. You cannot achieve gender equality or balancing anything in society unless there is the partnership of men in it. You need to balance the scale, because we have a lot of programmes empowering women, but what are we doing to not only empower but educate men of these challenges.
“The boys have their own challenges; they have their own stigma that they have to live up. So all of that comes with a lot of understanding. So, that thing with ‘boys will be boys’ is all nonsense. Boys have to be accountable,” she said.
Barrow said that her work is now getting started and she intended to put her Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology to good use to further develop Guyana.
