The year 2016 began with a two-day seminar in Georgetown on tackling domestic violence in Guyana, organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat. Mark Guthrie, a Legal Adviser at the Commonwealth Secretariat reminded the participants that domestic violence was concerned about the rule of law: “It concerned equality before the law and human rights, and the right of victims of domestic abuse to be accorded respect and receive justice in the courts. It is the obligation of any state to secure the human rights of those who live within its borders.”
Participants ranged from judges to police officers and the discussions were led by a team of experts from a range of Commonwealth jurisdictions including England, Cayman Islands, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Turks and Caicos Islands. Two decades before, following the Second World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 and the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1994, the Domestic Violence Act (1996) had been enacted against a background of mind-numbing violence against females in Guyana, to provide the legislative framework for handling cases of domestic violence.
Violence against women jeopardises women’s lives, bodies, psychological integrity and freedom, and is known as ‘gender-based’ violence because it partly stems from women’s subordinate status in society. Yet at the January 2016 conclave, a representative of Red Thread had to declare: “Let’s stop talking about causes and effects and let’s see what we can do to help women be independent and escape violence. Women have the right to safe homes. That’s a line we need to push to our governments.”
A Domestic Violence Policy Unit had been created in Guyana’s Ministry of Human Services and Social Security to oversee the implementation of the National Policy on Domestic Violence. The policy calls for the Government to provide temporary shelter services, counselling, social work services, and legal aid for victims, as well as training about domestic violence for healthcare workers, police, judges, magistrates, lawyers, and others.
However, back in 2010 the then minister bemoaned that one of the greatest challenges Guyana faced in countering domestic violence, especially sexual violence, was in changing the attitudes of service providers – such as Police, magistrates, social workers, and healthcare providers – towards domestic violence and gender equality.
She should have also mentioned the “attitude” of those placed at the very top of the Governmental apparatus. This month, her successor Minister in the APNU/AFC coalition Government has continued to defend her use of the euphemism, “deflowering” rather than “rape” for the act that impregnates preteen girls, which she complained had become rampant in certain communities in Guyana.
The laws of Guyana defines intercourse with any person under sixteen as “statutory rape” and the Minister’s refusal to use the term, and to mask it as a “deflowering” which is merely the piercing of a female’s hymen, ignores rape as the ultimate act of violence against females and illustrates the “attitude” her predecessor complained of.
Last Wednesday, there was another high-level forum to highlight the scourge, this one hosted by the Delegation of the European Union (EU) in Guyana at the Georgetown Marriott Hotel. The “wide cross-section of civil society stakeholders working in areas of human rights and gender rights”, according to the EU Delegation, were sensitised via a skit performance on domestic abuse and an excerpt from a documentary film called “Six Days”.
The EU’s release emphasised that violence against women and children has tremendous costs to communities, nations and societies and can remain with women and children for a lifetime and can pass from one generation to another.
Representing the Ministry of Social Protection, Gender Specialist Adel Lilly pointed out: “Awareness-raising campaigns are critical to prevent gender-based violence, not only by raising awareness of what constitutes violence and its unacceptability, but also to challenge the underlying attitudes and behaviours which support it.”
Maybe she can have a discussion with her Minister about her “attitude”.
