LAST WEEK the Senate of Barbados debated and passed the Domestic Violence (Protection Orders) (Amendment) Act, which marks the final legislative stage of this historic initiative.
It is important that we acknowledge the significance of this legislation, the extent to which it reflects our peculiar local circumstances and finally acknowledge the entities and individuals that toiled in the vineyard to make last week’s legislation a reality.
It is the responsibility of the Government to survey our landscape and identify critical issues that would benefit from legislative action and it is undeniable that domestic violence is one such problem. The CADRES Domestic Violence Report (2008) is dated but continued to be the most comprehensive report on this issue, combining qualitative, quantitative and empirical data.
That report speaks to police data which noted that between 2000 and 2007, on average 21 per cent of murders in Barbados arose from incidents of domestic violence. This was one in every five murders and in each of these cases the police had records of a previous complaint of domestic violence from the deceased.
This statistic is the clearest possible evidence that domestic violence represents a major national problem and while murder is the ultimate expression of violence, the report also demonstrated that in twelve months preceding the survey, there was a non-fatal incident of physical violence in more than 30 per cent of Barbadian homes. The investigation was restricted to physical violence; however, qualitative discussions demonstrated the extent to which some of the violence taking place was psychological, potentially adding a few thousand cases to the one-in-three estimate. The data pointed to nothing short of a crisis, which our well-intentioned Domestic Violence Protection Orders Act (1992) was powerless to respond to.
While the gravity of our problem is no different to that which obtains in other counties, the CADRES report highlighted some peculiar realities of the Barbados case which this legislation attempts to respond to. One of the more controversial of these is the fact that our 1992 legislation was not gender neutral which means that men could not apply for a protection order, while in six per cent of cases men were victims, whether in heterosexual or homosexual relationships. Sadly, Minister Lowe went on public record in opposition to gender neutrality, which presumably meant that he considered this deficiency of the 1992 legislation to be a good thing.
Thankfully, his cabinet colleagues were differently minded and while we await his promised resignation (if such gender neutral legislation was passed), the country is today better off having a legislative instrument that speaks to the complexity of the problem.
Another significant peculiarity was the fact that a considerable amount of domestic violence took place in the context of visiting relationships. These are, of course, very different to the typical “live-in” arrangement where a couple resides together to the exclusion of all others.
In our case, we found men, and to some extent women, who maintained multiple partners from whom they might or might not have had children, and who abused some or all of them. Multiple partners are a reality of our society, which shares much with the same-sex reality in that it is morally questionable for some, but it happens and can give rise to violence. It is, therefore, fortunate that the 2016 amendment has closed that loophole and now potential victims in visiting relationships can also receive protection from abusive partners.
Finally, it is important that we acknowledge specific contributions to this historic legislation.
In 2007 Nalita Gajadhar, project officer with the Gender Affairs Bureau, (which was at the time under the leadership of John Hollingsworth) contacted CADRESand sought an expression of interest in this seminal research project.
The report was completed after the change of government in 2008 and formed the basis of the first-ever national consultation on this issue which reviewed the findings and made concrete recommendations on the way forward.
Peter W. Wickham (peter.wickham@cariburf.com) is a political consultant and director of the Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES).