-GHRA
The failure to pass the Sexual Offences Bill into law “constitutes the most significant disappointment with respect to women,” the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) said yesterday, adding that nine months later the ‘Stamp it Out’ bill is still at the level of the Select Committee and expectations and momentum are waning.
The GHRA in its message to mark International Women’s Day, which is observed today, pointed out that locally domestic violence continues to attract headlines and media attention due to the frequency of “dreadful acts of violence against women and isolated official events of symbolic value involving men.”
“No less than at the international level, concerted national strategies, backed by significant resources and cross-party political support remain at the level of hopes and promises,” the association said.
Meanwhile, GHRA said contrary to the notion that women’s rights and status are secure in the highest international fora, “the reality is that women’s rights spiked in the ’90s and have steadily receded since.”
It said that as gender mainstreaming has replaced women’s rights, funding rights-based initiatives has become more difficult.
“In the context of the large numbers of women infected by HIV due to powerlessness to negotiate their sexual lives, it is scandalous that no UN Agency has specific responsibility for promoting reproductive rights of women,” the GHRA said.
Further, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to GHRA, provides the most reliable indicator of where women figure in multilateral priorities.
“Persistent reluctance to unequivocally acknowledge women as the group most vulnerable to high levels of infection is not restricted to the United Nations,” the association statement said.
“This leaves us with an extraordinary state of affairs in which the strategy for addressing HIV infection among 50% of the population (women) is determined by the strategy devised to address the fraction of the population comprising men who have sex with men (estimated at 3% of the population) and the fraction of 1% which makes up the transgender population. To state that women ‘have fallen through the cracks’ seems an inappropriate metaphor to refer to half of the population.”
