Latest update February 10th, 2025 2:25 PM
OP-ED: Message for the Elimination of Violence Against Women
By Dr. Karen Cummings
Kaieteur News – November 25 has been designated International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The definition of violence encompasses all of its forms. It also commences the UNITE Campaign that runs from November 25 to December 10, and its sixteen days of activism. This year the campaign’s theme speaks to the need for policymakers and civil society to Invest to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls with the Hashtag-No Excuse.
According to the United Nations, 736 million women and approximately one out of every three women has either been abused physically, verbally, or sexually by an intimate partner at least once in her lifetime. Article 1 of the United Nations Charter defines “Violence against women [as] an act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.”
A Caribbean-US author reported that the home has become the single most dangerous place for women as the female runs a greater risk of assault, physical injury and murder in her home than in any other setting.
Dr. Karen Cummings
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #5 tells us that rigorous and stringent efforts should be made to ensure that gender equality is achieved, and all women and girls are empowered. In other words, our women should be empowered, loved, and cared for. Women should have equal opportunities-including equal access to quality education, optimal health, economic resources, employment, leadership positions, and to the owning and controlling of property. Women must be at the bargaining table and in decision making.
On this Observance of International Elimination of Violence Against Women, recent spates of domestic violence, murders of our women, and under-addressed sexual abuse of our girls make progress seem far off. Fortunately, our culture is shifting. Our loudness at these injustices is proof of that, and it is a sign to work harder to protect our women and girls with more effective interventions. Let us start in our communities by taking threats made against women seriously, instead of laughing them off as lovers’ quarrels, or “passion”. We must continue to support our girls when they name abusers. Let us stop encouraging women to return after “cool down” periods, to partners who beat, and scream at them, or destroy their belongings.
We all have the obligation to say something when men follow our young girls in school uniforms, or on their way home from the shop. We must stop laughing off our boys making nasty comments, or sharing inappropriate videos of girls who have rejected them.
Institutionally, I call on our protection officers to be more intentional in their approach to cases of inter-partner violence—too many of our women report violent partners only to be brutally murdered because of delays, or dismissive police responses. The clarion call goes out to the pillars of the home, the school, the church/mandir/mosque to hold our friends, brothers, uncles, leaders, accountable, and for us as women to be stronger allies to each other. Let us End Violence Against Women NOW!
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