The Nature of Paradise

Abstract

In the popular imagination, the Caribbean is often typified by striking images of sunny days at the beach, fresh coconuts, colourful road-side fruit stalls encompassing all the wonders of the tropics, the warmth of the islands’ peoples; all cast alongside the pristine, sparkling waters of the Caribbean Sea. This is indeed an accurate snapshot of Caribbean life, if in part. This is what sells the Caribbean; that it is a haven away from bitterly cold winters and smartphone agendas. This chapter does not seek to detract from the vivid imagery, the tourism-driven advertisements of the Caribbean, since this is part of our way of life and neither does it aim to de-construct those ideas associated with Caribbeanness. Rather, the main aim of this chapter is to build other dimensions onto that of the ‘paradisiacal’ Caribbean in an attempt to introduce the reader to the multiple historical, social, political and economic layers that lie beneath its idealistic surface. This contextualisation is important in understanding child sexual abuse (CSA), the focus of this book, since issues of domination and subjugation that underpin childhood victimisation do not emerge in a vacuum and are located within particular socio-historic specificities. The activities of international development agencies, and the research and policy developments crafted in their wake, have tended to subsume the Caribbean as a territory within the category ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’. While the reasons for this may be wholly pragmatic, this has contributed to several misconceptions, first, that there are more similarities than differences among the Caribbean and Latin America and, secondly, that the Caribbean is homogenous. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.