By Renuka Anandjit and Angelique V. Nixon
Renuka N. Anandjit is a Guyanese born, Trinidad-based scholar and activist. She is a PhD Candidate, Research Assistant and Coordinator for the undergraduate student group IGDS Ignite, at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine.
Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, scholar and activist. She is a lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and a director of the feminist LGBTQI organisation CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice.
The UN Women’s theme of this year’s 16 Days of Activism is “Orange the World: End Violence against Women Now!” (amplified across the Caribbean through the Spotlight Initiative Project). These words are etched into the consciousness of many, whether you’re a survivor, an advocate, a concerned citizen, or follow the news. Over the decades, we have heard many versions of this message, but for 2021, why the “Now!”. Perhaps it reflects a sense of urgency in our collective and individual response to end the violence. Is it perhaps because the world as we know it is in turmoil? Or is it the increased Gender Based Violence (GBV) awareness and attention to attitudes and behaviours that give rise to GBV? Perhaps it is a combination of these along-side increasing demands by publics and civil society to do more in institutional and state responses to GBV. The ‘now’ as a rallying cry is not new, it is a rinse and repeat. But the urgency of the now is more glaringly evident as we cast an eye on a region in crisis.
Why employ crisis in describing the region? Because it reflects the reality of the now — from economic and ecological to the pandemic. The crisis is evident in the Caribbean region’s prevalence rates of violence against women and girls being among the highest in the world. The crisis is in the normalisation of violence generally and the invisibility of some forms of violence. The crisis is in the state of our environment, where the reality of climate change has long been upon us. The crisis also lies in the lack of access to sexual and reproductive health and comprehensive sex education for young people, and for women and girls especially. The crisis lies in colonial structures in education, law, and social systems that leave far too many people without access or justice. The crisis lies in deep historical injustices and root causes of inequalities that sustain systems of oppression.
The state makes many decisions that impact our human rights, which fuels the underlying factors (at the intersections of economic precarity, lack of access to services, and harmful sexist behaviours) that contribute to the alarming rates of GBV. State efforts to address the GBV crisis can get lost amidst other forms of crisis, even more so during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly for Caribbean countries, managing the COVID-19 response, ongoing economic crisis and public health mandates has taken precedence over everything else. And rightfully so. Governments have had to make difficult decisions and impossible choices in order to save lives. If we consider the depths of the crisis when it comes to public health mandates, lockdowns, and economic fallout, state accountability is clear and up for intense political debate. However, when it comes to GBV and state accountability, there is a severe lack of response. GBV affects at least one third of the population directly. Global research confirms that 1 out of 3 women (and in our region 1 out of 2 partnered women) will experience some form of GBV in their lifetimes.
These numbers are, to put it mildly, alarming and should be addressed by the state as any other serious public health crisis. Yet what we see in terms of GBV response in our region is an over-dependence on civil society service providers with police and legal structures failing far too many survivors and victims of GBV. We also know from prevalence studies that underreporting of GBV remains a serious concern as far too many women and girls are failed by the police and courts. The situation is even more dire for LGBQTI+ people who also experience violence disproportionately and are often left out of GBV protection or services. This contributes to the high levels of underreporting. There are egregious cases of state failure recently that tell us what we already know — there is a persistent problem in how state institutions deal with GBV.
The case of eighteen year old Tonika Calder in Guyana is one heartbreaking example. On November 6, Tonika was allegedly raped by a taxi driver known to her family. According to news reports, she reported this to the police a few days later with her mother, where she was forced to participate in a confrontation with the accused at the police station. She was forced to relive the trauma of the rape as well as provide the details of her sex life in front of the accused and her mother. Upon returning home, she died by suicide. The accused rapist was released from police custody and the charges dropped. News reports indicate this happened because the victim is deceased. This violation and report was not taken seriously by the police nor did they follow state protocols and laws that insist no confrontations should happen between victims and accused. Further, the young woman was never given any support but instead abused, victim shamed, and further violated by the state — the police put her in direct harm and likely contributed to her taking her own life. How can we even make sense of this right now? How do we ensure nothing like this ever happens again? How do we trust the state when it comes to GBV and gender justice?
The lack of state accountability not only extends to the public when it comes to GBV but also to multilateral human rights agreements and conventions (from CEDAW to the Rights of the Child). While governments struggle (and fail) to meet these obligations under international law, there is little to no accountability in these failures. Yet when civil society, service providers, and community groups call upon governments to do something about GBV, we either receive lip service or silence. Certainly, we have raised the alarm again and again and frankly any progress made is (too often) in spite of the lack of political will. In Trinidad and Tobago, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) continue demanding state action under the coalition Alliance for State Action to End GBV with limited progress — notably the DV Act Amendment — but most demands go unmet — yet CSOs are relied upon to provide GBV services.
We can’t help but draw connections to the other deepening and insurmountable crisis our region has faced for decades — the climate crisis — where we also see a striking lack of accountability. We know that Caribbean governments are caught in tourism dependency and unsustainable neoliberal development models with few meaningful alternatives for climate mitigation and adaptation. Further, it is evident that our small region has barely contributed to the crisis we are in – although massive announcements of oil finds in Guyana’s waters raise concerning questions for all of us – yet we are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. The “1.5 to Stay Alive” rallying cry has been on repeat in the past few years as Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have made our voices heard through various international platforms — most recently the COP26 — which has been criticised by Global South activists as another failure in securing our future.
Global South leaders, activists, and CSOs have argued for Global North and Corporate investments in renewable and sustainable solutions and meaningful green future investments. We need that immediately to enable us (Small Island Developing States – SIDS – especially) to mitigate and adapt to the rapidly changing environment — from extreme weather patterns and deadly hurricanes to sea level rise — that are frankly making our islands unliveable. Climate change has been a focal point for the region in recent years, given the harsh realities of extractive industries, tourism economies, dependency capitalism and mono-economies.
Recently the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights hosted a landmark hearing on the impact of the mining and fossil fuel industries on the rights of women, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and rural communities in the Caribbean, led by Jamaica, The Bahamas, Guyana, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago. Immaculata Casimero of Guyana gave testimony at the hearing where she highlighted the importance of land tenure security and emphasised the absence of consultation by the state in granting mining licences and concessions on indigenous lands. She described the connections between threats to cultural survival, food security, economic precarity (especially from pollution and flooding), access to health-care, exploitation, and sexual violence. This testimony provided clear under-standing of the multiple forms of marginalisation remote communities experience at the intersections of environmental degradation, climate crisis, and the failure of state mechanisms to support survivors, provide services, or penalise perpetrators. Other testimonies from across the five Caribbean countries made it clear that extractive industries continue without transparency, consultation or inclusion of communities and people most impacted. The damage to local economies and environments across the region was highlighted throughout the hearing with an alarming lack of state accountability.
Exclusion, unmet needs, inadequate investment, disregard for the experiences and threats for SIDS as a result of decision-making by G20 countries (who failed to honour their commitment from the Paris summit), were the main concerns emerging from COP26 shared by our region’s leaders. If we were to remove G20 and SIDS from this equation and replace them with the State and advocates for improved mechanisms for GBV, would we draw the same equivalencies? Where do the differences lie — in the economic, social and political impact? Perhaps the gravity of GBV is not as alarming as the world in crisis, but if we examine violence at an interpersonal and institutional level, does it not have real world ramifications on families, communities and economies? The irony is real when we see our leaders take the global stage and make these calls for accountability from the larger nations, when regionally this is something they struggle with in their policies and responses to social, environmental and gendered issues.
So as we reflect on the intersections of crisis during these 16 Days of Activism, we are reminded that the ‘now’ as a rallying cry is not new, it is a rinse and repeat. But the urgency of the now is almost beyond us. The Global Campaign for 16 Days of Activism theme is “From Awareness to Accountability” — this must be our rallying cry. We need new and long-term solutions not only through state accountability but also intersectional actions that are community-led, transfor-mative and rooted in social, gender and environmental justice for all.
