THE BRUTAL SLAYING of Caroline Forde a few days ago has once again brought into the national spotlight the vexed problem of domestic violence, with citizens being justifiably very concerned about the continuing failure of the country’s relevant institutions to demonstrate perceptible and appreciable progress in managing, far less eradicating, this protracted social scourge.
In the immediate wake of the murder, the society was treated to the protestations of Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite that Government planned to “fast track” a Domestic Violence Bill to Parliament before the end of the year, noting that the Royal Barbados Police Force (RBPF) had established a special unit to deal with domestic violence and had plans for more training for officers to deal with this phenomenon.
While current victims of domestic violence and their family and friends would have welcomed the assurances by Brathwaite, the reality is that the public has a right to be dissatisfied that the special unit about which he spoke had seemingly not yet been able to make its presence felt as the first line of defence for those needing its services.
For the public very well remembers that in the DAILY NATION newspaper of May 12, 2013, then Commissioner of Police Darwin Dottin had quite definitively spoken of the force’s “new approach” to dealing with domestic violence, including the creation of a Family Conflict Unit, specially designed to handle such matters and involving specialist training for its personnel.
Dottin also disclosed that he had ordered the immediate cessation of the common practice of victims being shunted back and forth between police stations on the grounds that the reports could only be handled by certain stations, replacing it by a policy in which such reports should be taken where they are made, rather than the victims being turned away and exposed to further danger.
In other words, the “one-size-fits-all” policy would be stopped and “careful evaluation carried out about the particular circumstances”.
Barbadians in general and those endangered by domestic violence, in particular, felt they had good reason to be encouraged by what sounded like a progressive, sensitive and proactive approach by the Police Commissioner. For them to hear about three months later from the Attorney General a mere repeat of the concept rather than a progress report on the activities of this laudable Family Conflict Unit has therefore been disappointing, to put it mildly.
The heartbreaking reports from the deceased Forde’s family of her frustrating experiences from the RBPF’s failure to meaningfully intervene as Dottin had promised have raised questions about why, more than 90 days after being announced, there is no public evidence that the unit has started to function at all or, if it had, why it had not done so in the way described by the previous police administration.
The hope is that, given the extensive changes that have been made across the RBPF since Dottin was removed as commissioner, this highly desirable department has not fallen victim to review, reorganization or restructuring for the benefit of the force’s internal public, at the expense of its more important external public of victims of domestic violence.
