Jesse Ramdeo

The head of one NGO is de­clar­ing that do­mes­tic vi­o­lence is the most per­pe­trat­ed crime in this coun­try.

Coali­tion Against Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence pres­i­dent Rober­ta Clarke on Wednes­day used stud­ies to back up her claim.

Clarke said, “We are say­ing very clear­ly here to­day that the ac­tions be­ing tak­en by the State, and we used the word State in the broad­est non-par­ti­san, non-po­lit­i­cal way, the ac­tions of the State have to meet the scale of the chal­lenge, there must be a po­lit­i­cal will to meet the scale, do­mes­tic vi­o­lence is the most per­pe­trat­ed crime in this coun­try,” Clarke said dur­ing a par­lia­men­tary meet­ing on the State’s ca­pac­i­ty to pro­vide sup­port for vic­tims of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence and fam­i­ly con­flicts.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions, Clarke said find­ings sug­gest that many in­stances of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence con­tin­ue to go un­re­port­ed.

A meet­ing on the same top­ic a month ago host­ed by the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice showed sta­tis­tics that for the pe­ri­od 2020 to 2022, there were over 6,000 re­ports of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.

Clarke said, “Three things hap­pen­ing in re­la­tion to the da­ta, one, the ma­jor­i­ty of cas­es go un­re­port­ed, most women don’t re­port a vi­o­lence they ex­pe­ri­ence. Sec­ond­ly, we have a lack of record­ing of the re­ports and we still hear that. Be­cause peo­ple who ex­pe­ri­ence vi­o­lence go to a num­ber of sites for re­sponse and ser­vices, the sites don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly share their da­ta, so we don’t start off with any firm foun­da­tion of what are the in­ci­dents of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.”

Asiya Mo­hammed, founder of Con­flict Women Ltd, al­so said that due to so­cio eco­nom­ic chal­lenges com­pound­ed by the pan­dem­ic, do­mes­tic vi­o­lence sur­vivors and their de­fen­dants were evict­ed af­ter be­ing un­able to pay their rent.

She said, “Some of these sur­vivors would have ac­tu­al­ly ap­proached the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices to ac­cess the rent as­sis­tance grant. How­ev­er, that process can be quite de­layed and it al­so re­quired a num­ber of doc­u­ments so we did have sur­vivors who were evict­ed whilst await­ing that grant.”

Chair­man of the Shel­ter for Bat­tered Women, Collin Mitchell, al­so lament­ed that he was giv­en a sub­ven­tion of $7,500 a month by the Gov­ern­ment but his fa­cil­i­ty needs about 10 times this to func­tion.

Mitchell said it has be­come in­creas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to gen­er­ate mon­ey through fund rais­ing events.