Geisha Kow­lessar

There has been a re­sound­ing call by Mar­garet Samp­son-Browne, chair­man of the Vic­tim and Wit­ness Sup­port Unit to im­ple­ment suf­fi­cient net­work­ing and re­sources to tack­le the scourge of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence. Samp­son-Browne, a re­tired As­sis­tant Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er in charge of Com­mu­ni­ty Re­la­tions, was award­ed woman of the year dur­ing yes­ter­day's launch of Ad­vo­cates for Safe Par­ent­hood: Im­prov­ing Re­pro­duc­tive (AS­PIRE) Re­search Find­ings and Woman of the Year Award held in Port-of-Spain.

She al­so called on po­lice of­fi­cers to ef­fec­tive­ly and ef­fi­cient­ly put their train­ing to use as their role was al­so in­stru­men­tal in the fight against do­mes­tic vi­o­lence. Asked if she be­lieved there had been suf­fi­cient ef­forts on the part of var­i­ous stake­hold­ers dur­ing the last ten years in which, ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics from the Crime and Prob­lem Analy­sis Unit (CA­PA), there has been a steady rise in do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, Samp­son-Browne said this "was lack­ing".

"Some of us didn't act fast enough, we didn't have the net­work­ing enough, the net­work­ing sys­tem wasn't ef­fec­tive enough. "I wouldn't say there has been a short­fall. What I am say­ing is there must be suf­fi­cient net­work­ing and re­sources," Samp­son-Browne said. Prais­ing the ef­forts of the Po­lice Ser­vice she said there was "tu­mul­tuous train­ing" tak­ing place to in­crease the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of po­lice of­fi­cers as it re­lat­ed to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence mat­ters.

Asked whether there was a short­fall as it re­lat­ed to the im­ple­men­ta­tion of such train­ing, Samp­son-Browne cit­ed this as a man­age­ment is­sue. "My man­agers need to un­der­stand their role in the po­lice sta­tion to re­al­ly en­force the kind of func­tion­ing that is re­quired for com­mu­ni­ties.

"It is not ac­cept­able that some­one goes to a po­lice sta­tion and some­one re­fus­es them or put them out. There are sergeants and in­spec­tors at these po­lice sta­tions and they need to un­der­stand their roles and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and there may be a time where the ex­ec­u­tives need to pull the strings of those man­agers a bit," Samp­son-Browne said.

For the pe­ri­od 2010 to 2011, there were 11,984 new cas­es of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence cas­es filed in the Mag­is­trates Court ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics pro­vid­ed by the Fam­i­ly Court for Au­gust 2010 to Ju­ly 2011. For the same pe­ri­od 12,031 cas­es were de­cid­ed, A break­down of da­ta ac­cord­ing to dif­fer­ent di­vi­sions re­vealed that in 2010 Cen­tral and South­ern Di­vi­sions record­ed the high­est in­ci­dence of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence of­fences with fig­ures of 301 and 493 re­spec­tive­ly.

For 2010 South­ern Di­vi­sion record­ed the high­est fig­ure with 677 re­ports, but North­ern Di­vi­sion record­ed the sec­ond high­est with 340 in­ci­dents. With was fol­lowed by Cen­tral Di­vi­sion with 320 re­ports and South West­ern Di­vi­sion with 300 re­port­ed mat­ters. For the pe­ri­od 2001 to 2011 there were 92,524 new cas­es filed in the Mag­is­trates Court re­lat­ing to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.

The same pe­ri­od re­vealed that 90,327 cas­es were de­cid­ed. The ma­jor­i­ty of these cas­es were ap­pli­ca­tions for and vari­ance of pro­tec­tion or­ders. The num­bers al­so re­flect­ed the dis­missal of ap­pli­ca­tions for pro­tec­tion or­ders, as­saults and oth­er forms of abuse as de­fined un­der the Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence Act, the da­ta stat­ed.