Even though efforts are being made to modernise the laws on women rights in Guyana, the progress is being hamstrung on all fronts by the impunity with which men of all social levels in society routinely perpetrate “lethal violence against women”, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has said.
It called for a strategy to promote values and attitudes which embrace rather than resist the array of modern legislation available to improve the status of women in Guyana. Such a strategy, GHRA said, is neither compatible with nor achievable by short-term, male-generated projects of uncertain duration. Financial support for any initiative in the strategy must be genuinely women-led, administered and evaluated and supported at the highest levels of leadership.
The association said while the leadership — male in all sectors – will forcefully condemn violence against women and children it fails to appreciate how “steeped in chauvinistic attitudes all sectors remain, nurturing violence against women and girls.” GHRA said male religious leadership seems particularly in denial over its historic responsibility for the powerful religious rationale sustaining the subordination of women and girls which underpins violence against them.
In its press release to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, being observed today, the GHRA posited that the answer to the problem lies in the culture (that is, values and ways of doing things) of the police and judicial systems, rooted in a larger national culture resistant to a modern role for women and reluctant to abandon violence in all its forms.
Ambivalence in official attitudes to violence was typically illustrated during this past week alone, where several events were reported by the media. These include a man who almost killed his partner by physical violence being able to get her bedside in a hospital after he was released on $20,000 station bail with no charges laid by the police; President Bharrat Jagdeo’s meeting with civil society organisations to mobilise against violence against women, the Ministry of Education retaining of corporal punishment in the new Education Act and President Jagdeo supporting the retention of the death penalty in an interview. “With the exception of the first incident, these official positions mirror the inclinations of a wide cross-sector of the male population in Guyana.”
The GHRA noted that efforts to address the issue in Guyana are being overwhelmed and outpaced by the scale of the problem while adding that the country’s modern legislation has “consistently failed over the past decade to gain traction” with respect to violence against women and girls.
“Unless confronted by a coordinated and sustained national strategy, promoted by the leadership of all sectors, violence against women and girls will continue to be under-estimated and the progress of women in general undermined,” the association said. The GHRA stated that legislation on Termination of Pregnancy, Equality, Domes-tic Violence, Age of Consent and Trafficking together with the proposed reforms of Divorce and Sexual Offences laws all point to commitment at the level of the state to improve the status of women. And assuming the passage of the proposed Sexual Offences legislation in the near future, the GHRA said that Guyana will enjoy one of the most progressive legal regimes on women’s rights in the Americas – along with Cuba and Canada.
However, the GHRA said changing the culture underpinning violence against women, in addition to effective legislation, requires changes in values and attitudes manifested in the:
sexualisation of virtually every form of advertising, absence of protective mechanisms against explicit visuals, obscene lyrics on television and graphically violent in the press, religious opposition to women’s reproductive rights and sexuality, religious rationale for subordination of women to men, willingness of most Guyanese to condone some form of violence (corporal punishment, beating children, death penalty, extra-judicial killings, gay-bashing, rough-up detainees, torture, pornography, etcetera).
“All of the above contribute to an environment conducive to violence against women. Unfortunately, this integrated nature of violence escapes most opinion-makers in the society,” GHRA said.
And while male support in freeing up the society from violence against women is important, GHRA said the priority must be empowering women to confront directly the obstacles which need to be challenged and removed. “This process – painful for male leadership – entails enabling women in all sectors of society to challenge the practices and values illustrated above that serve as vehicles for demeaning and devaluing women.”