News Releases

Addressing Gender-Based Violence is essential to COVID-19 response and recovery

For Release Upon Receipt - April 24, 2020

St. Augustine


ST. AUGUSTINE, Trinidad and Tobago. Friday 24, April, 2020 - The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The UWI, St. Augustine Campus has observed the drastic rise in domestic violence with “203 police reports made for March compared with 42 reports for the same month in 2019” as reported by the Express on Thursday 23 April 2020. This is part of a worldwide rise in intimate partner violence and family violence deeply rooted in gender norms, and triggered by the COVID-19 crisis and state response.

The UN is reporting that “Lebanon and Malaysia, for example, have seen the number of calls to helplines double, compared with the same month last year; in China, they have tripled; and in Australia, search engines such as Google are seeing the highest magnitude of searches for domestic violence help in the past five years”. Violence against women is also triggering increased demand for emergency shelter in Canada, Germany, Argentina, Spain, the UK and the US. There is a global call to increase investment in online services and civil society organisations responding to gender-based violence, and declare shelters as essential services.

The Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and allies across the women’s movement and civil society, have publicly outlined the risks to women as their capacity to escape violence with their children, and to seek safety, is now diminished by the national lockdown.

We have also noted that greater economic and psychological stress on families, due to income loss and heightened insecurity, can exacerbate women and girls’ vulnerability to physical and sexual violence in their homes, from family members and partners. Pre-COVID-19, 1 in 3 women reported experiencing sexual or physical violence from their partners in their lifetime, and 1 in 5 reported experiencing child sexual abuse at least once in their lifetime, suggesting that home and family were already sites of threat, fear and potential harm. These are the spaces to which women are now confined.

Pre-COVID-19, resources available to victims were already woefully inadequate, and the state of gender-based violence was already considered to be at a crisis level in Trinidad and Tobago. Government agencies are now turning to civil society organisations for help in the provision of safe accommodation for victims, as state-managed shelters and resources for psychological support are not sufficiently available. Such organisations providing support on the ground should be better resourced, given their ability to respond with greater agility than state bureaucracy at a time when such urgency is required.

As the Prime Minister’s team plans the post-COVID ‘Road to Recovery’, the IGDS notes with continued disappointment that no one on the team is positioned to represent on these matters despite a call for the inclusion of representatives with expertise in gender analysis and gender-based violence. Recovery considerations must include clear research-based and experience-based understanding of women and girls’ unequal burden of care for vulnerable populations, their increased risk as essential workers without access to proper child care, and as primary workers in the service and retail sector which is expected to contract significantly - all of which define the conditions of family violence.

On April 23, 2020, 146 countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, answered the UN Secretary-General’s Call on Gender-Based Violence and COVID-19 and committed “to making prevention and redress of gender-based violence a key part of our national and global responses” as well as ensuring that “issues of gender equality are treated as essential to recovery”.

We call on the government to honour this commitment by outlining how it will address increased gender-based violence in the recovery period from COVID-19 and to treat victims’ immediate need for safety and shelter as an urgent priority. We call for the inclusion of the women’s movement, with more than 30 years of experience addressing gender-based violence, in planning for post-disaster recovery. We also call on the government to recognise that the increase in domestic violence reports requires, more than ever, a national strategy to prevent and address this immediate as well as long term crisis.

 

                                                              End

 

Notes to Editor

Related Articles:

Answering the UN Secretary-General’s Call on Gender-Based Violence and COVID-19 - Statement by 146 UN Member States and Observers

https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/media-and-resources/news/joint-united-nations-statement-on-gender-based-violence-under-covid-19/

Put women and girls at the centre of efforts to recover from COVID-19

https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/put-women-and-girls-centre-efforts-recover-covid-19

UN chief calls for domestic violence ‘ceasefire’ amid ‘horrifying global surge’

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1061052

 

About The UWI

Since its inception in 1948, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has evolved from a fledgling college in Jamaica with 33 students to a full-fledged, regional University with well over 40,000 students. Today, The UWI is the largest, most longstanding higher education provider in the Commonwealth Caribbean, with four campuses in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Open Campus. The UWI has faculty and students from more than 40 countries and collaborative links with 160 universities globally; it offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Food & Agriculture, Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science and Technology, Social Sciences and Sport. The UWI’s seven priority focal areas are linked closely to the priorities identified by CARICOM and take into account such over-arching areas of concern to the region as environmental issues, health and wellness, gender equity and the critical importance of innovation. Website: www.uwi.edu

(Please note that the proper name of the university is The University of the West Indies, inclusive of the “The”, hence The UWI.)

Contact