President of the National Women’s Commission (NWC), Thea Garcia-Ramirez, is calling for legislation to deal with femicide, the killing of a woman or girl, in particular by a man and on account of her gender.
She made the call after police confirmed that a 23-year-old mother of two, died at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital (KHMH) from gunshot wounds sustained after gunmen fired upon her during the early hours of Monday. Her four-year-old child also sustained injury.
‘“A lot of the times what you don’t realise is that for a lot of women, one in three women – so if you know 10 women, chances are that three of those women, inside their home is the least safe that they can be,” Garcia-Ramirez said.
“It is inside the home where they are faced with domestic violence with gender based violence and all these killing of women and the disappearance of women is just another phase to gender-based violence. It’s the extreme.”
Garcia-Ramirez said the authorities are not doing enough, adding “we are not doing enough for our women, we are not doing enough for our girls; we need to do more, we need to do better because one life loss is one life too many.
“We have to stop sending out press releases. It is disheartening, it is maddening. I mean I am not only disheartened, I am angry that this continues to happen and it seems with impunity because the rates are so low for conviction, the rates are so low for charges being levied.”
She said while her statement should not be viewed as a criticism of the police, “but you have to look at how well they are equipped, we have to look at what resources they are given.
“We have to look at legislature; the fact that femicide is not a thing in our law books, so we cannot even quantify the amount of women that have died and the cause of death is not labelled as what it is.
“Women are asleep in their homes and they are dying, they are literally dying and we cannot continue to normalize violence within the home and on the streets and we cannot continue to allow women to be missing and then found later in shallow graves, murdered. It cannot continue.”
Garcia-Ramirez wants a gender policy that “will allow us to ensure that steps are taken at a national level to ensure that women are safe, women are happy, women are productive and move our country forward”.
The Regional Commander of the Police Eastern Division, ACP Hilberto Romero, said initial investigations show that 23-year-old Jasmine Domingo, was sleeping with her child at their home along with several other children and other male persons when a male person came to the house and fired several shots through a wooden window.
He said the investigations are continuing.
BELMOPAN, Belize, Jul 18, CMC –
CMC/ag/ir/2023