Shal­iza Has­sanali

Min­is­ter of Gen­der, Youth and Child De­vel­op­ment Ver­na St Rose-Greaves in­tends mount­ing a na­tion­al con­sul­ta­tion on T&T's Mar­riage Act. Al­so, DNA and Child Leg­is­la­tion mea­sures are in the cards since chil­dren need to know their lin­eage. These were just two of the is­sues St Rose-Greaves touched on as she of­fered her bud­get con­tri­bu­tion in Par­lia­ment on Fri­day. St Rose-Greaves said her min­istry was mov­ing to have con­sul­ta­tion on the Mar­riage Act since there are im­pli­ca­tions on how we pros­e­cute peo­ple. "We pros­e­cute peo­ple for hav­ing sex with a mi­nor, a girl un­der 14 and a boy un­der 16. But our Mar­riage Act al­lows for mar­riages of girls 12, 14, 16 and so on."

St Rose-Greaves al­so gave a break­down of sta­tis­tics, point­ing out that 32 per cent of the coun­try's pop­u­la­tion were sin­gle fe­males who are among the poor­est in the na­tion. Fif­teen per cent of live births are by teenage moth­ers who had not com­plet­ed ba­sic ed­u­ca­tion, while 86 per cent of clients call­ing the na­tion­al do­mes­tic hot­line are women, with 12 per cent be­ing chil­dren. "This amounts to 3,500 clients each year who are in need of safe hous­es to cope." With re­gard to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, there were 940 re­ports in 2010. 68.2 per cent of these led to ar­rests for as­sault and beat­ings. The num­ber of homi­cides due to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence is sec­ond to gang vi­o­lence ac­cord­ing to the min­is­ter.

Last year, St Rose-Greaves said, 250 rapes were re­port­ed to the po­lice with 22 re­ports on in­cest. There were al­so 158 re­ports of griev­ous sex­u­al as­sault and 278 re­ports of sex with fe­males un­der 14 years. The min­is­ter said when she func­tioned as a com­mu­ni­ty ac­tivist, she found out that when some of the trou­bled young men were go­ing out to com­mit their ghast­ly acts they would re­cruit one per­son in the group in­fect­ed with the HIV virus. "We need in­ter­ven­tion cen­tres in each com­mu­ni­ty," said St Rose-Greaves, stress­ing that this is one way so­cial is­sues can be tack­led.