The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) is perturbed at the lack of urgency in the timeframe set for gender equality in this year’s International Women’s Day theme, which, it said, demonstrates a subordination of women’s rights to broader gender concerns.
In a press release issued on Monday, the GHRA citing the theme, ‘Planet 50-50 by 2030 – Step it up for Gender Equality,’ compared it with the resolve that attended migration and money laundering and noted that had lax timeframes been applied to these issues, there would have been an international outcry.
Contending that women’s rights are the most urgent human rights priority, the release said the complacent time-frame seemed unperturbed by the untold numbers of murdered and disfigured women that can be expected by 2030. This lack of international intensity on women’s rights stands in contrast with dedicated work at ground level which continues to reveal that the achievement of women’s rights remains an uphill task, it said.
Education of women, for example, reflects progress in women’s rights, but it has also exposed the degree of resistance to re-ordering of domestic gender roles which the education of girls implies. Coercive male control, or patriarchy, has always been the crucial gender battleground. It remains pervasively manifest in everyday ordeals of checking cell phones and interrogation over length of time spent out of the house or on Facebook and control of women’s earnings by partners, the release stated. Control is the commonest form of domestic abuse. It also remains, according to recent studies, a huge risk factor for domestic homicide.
Controlling behaviour, however, is not a crime in Guyana or most other countries. Providing evidence of such behaviours to satisfy criminal standards is likely to be particularly difficult. The release said a leading expert in this area has noted that the “Why doesn’t she just leave?” mentality has permeated every agency, adding, “They cannot appreciate that coercive control means she doesn’t have a choice.”
Identifying coercive control is not easy and is going to require some fundamental changes in approach. The same expert noted that rather than investigating, for example, a domestic incident by asking “What happened?” which will produce very little evidence, they need to ask what a week in the person’s life is like and they will get a very different response.
The release concluded that while the status of all women remains so vulnerable to domination and the coercive control of men, it is an illusion to believe that the rights of minorities, such as indigenous, migrant, trafficked and disabled women along with women vulnerable to sexual orientation discrimination can be secured and protected.
This is not to undermine the struggle to secure and protect rights of these minorities, so much as guard against any untroubled belief that women’s fundamental rights are so well-established that they can be submerged into generalities about ‘gender’ for the next fifteen years.
