LAST Saturday morning, a group of men led by His Excellency President Donald Ramotar, Prime Minister Samuel Hinds, Minister of Human Services Jennifer Webster, and other personalities, marched down the streets of Georgetown to make a statement against domestic violence, a scourge suffered to a greater or lesser extent in most countries. That men should be marching for this purpose is significant.  Although men may also be victims of domestic violence in its various forms, it is males that by far tend to be the aggressors.
As we all know, males are, on average, stronger, more impulsive, more violent, and more prone to take risks and challenges.  Properly directed, these traits, melded with courage, can be positive qualities.  Historically they allowed males to protect their own:  family, tribe, and nation.
However, when a male turns his strengths against the harmless and the weak, he is not courageous.  He becomes a coward.  His cowardice is particularly harmful when it hurts his wife, children, or the elderly, because a family is a very special kind of community.
In society we normally establish quid pro quo relations.  If we want a car we have to pay for it; if we need money we work for a wage, and so forth.  But families are different.  A family is a community of love.  This is not a poetic definition but a very realistic and, in fact, existential one because it describes its origin and its ends.

More than in any other type of community, in our families we do not seek mainly our personal interests, but we seek the wellbeing of all.  Parents are willing to make enormous sacrifices for their children, husbands and wives sometimes go into great lengths to please the other.
In fact, it is in the horizon of family where the ultimate ends of life appear.  These ends which, according to Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, are what really count because they provide a true sense to our existence.  In one of his most conflictive and enlightening works, Tiempo Nublado, where he confronts critically, with relentless moral tension, the challenges, dangers and difficulties of modernity, he enumerates such ends as happiness in this life, salvation in the other, goodness, truth, wisdom, love.
Such is the community that is destroyed by domestic violence.  One in which, we could add, every member should find refuge, support, counsel, security… and forgiveness.  And the consequence of harming it does not only hurt every one of its members, including the perpetrator, but extend to society as a whole.
Violence has no role in family life. We have to learn to practice self control and strive to make families the preserve of love and harmony, where reason and understanding are the guiding principles, where respect, patience and gentle persuasion are means to deal with differences, where values are the cornerstone that allows us to educate our children, and ourselves, in freedom.

This implies a different approach to the notion of authority in family life.  Does it seem idealistic, or perhaps impossible?  I am convinced that an approach guided by self-control, love, and understanding, coupled with patience and persuasion will be more effective than the pretence of authoritarian spousal or parental control which, in fact, is bound to be, sooner or later, circumvented or openly rejected.
If there is no violence in our families, let us keep them that way, and make our best effort to ensure that they are always the realm of generosity and cheerfulness, endowed with heaps of good humour, in spite of the difficulties that we may face.  If violence is already present, the challenge will be greater, but we have our hearts and minds to change things.  If we overcame violence in our families, we can help others to achieve peace.  In any event, if we make God the centre of our family life, we will have his all powerful support.