Almost half of the women in T&T have experienced intimate partner violence, including emotional, sexual, physical or financial violence. And the majority of these women are in the workplace.
So said Gabrielle Hosein, lecturer and Head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the Universit of the West Indies, at the sixth annual First Citizens Women First conference at the Hilton Trinidad, Port-of-Spain yesterday.
Saying that employers have a responsibility to do their part in ending violence against women, Hosein added that intimate partner violence also affected women’s health, which ultimately redounded to loss of productivity.
“We have never thought about addressing productivity through addressing violence. My call is for the private sector to think about productivity and how it can be improved by actually improving the lives of women workers,” Hosein urged.
Women’s rights activist Hazel Brown, in her contribution during the question and answer segment, echoed similar sentiments, saying efforts must be made to measure the economic cost of violence in T&T.
“Those numbers will be huge and we had the experience when we were dealing with HIV/Aids, that when UWI began to measure those numbers it made a lot of difference to the kind of support that we could get, but we haven’t taken that approach to domestic violence,” Brown said.
Group Chief Executive Officer at First Citizens, Karen Darbasie, in her address, said the conference’s title, Changing the Narrative, signalled the bank’s commitment to not just talking about these issues but to spurring further action on some of the leading problems that affect relationships among and between men and women.
“The dominant current narrative is that women have been viewed as the secondary sex in a world where power and control has rested in the hands of men and masculinity. This is often reinforced by religion and by cultural practices that have to all appearances benefitted men more than women historically and in some areas continue to do so into the present,” Darbasie said.
She said gender issues cannot be isolated from each other, adding that the conference positioned the importance of corporate responsibility and leadership on issues ranging from ending violence against women to supporting the social and workplace changes that allow women and men to deal with sexual harassment concerns and to find work-life balance.
“These issues have been recurrent in the gender conversation for at least four decades in this society and elsewhere,” Darbasie added.