Women’s Caucus Forum to Tackle Gender-Based Violence

The Women’s Parliamentary Caucus is hosting a forum this week on ending gender based violence.  As the 16 Days of Activism continues, the President of the caucus, Janelle Chanona-Coye is calling on students, parents, educators and the general public to attend.  The event starts at nine o’clock tomorrow morning with a focus on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).  According to Chanona, one part of the event is to bring awareness on the convention and how Belize can benefit from a meaningful execution.

Janelle Chanona, Women’s Parliamentary Caucus: “We’ll be pulling in regional and international presenters to talk about CEDAW, to talk about Beijing Plus 30, and really looking at how we can play a role as women parliamentarians in making sure it just does not become another convention. We really need it to work for us because as a woman, I’m sure as father to women, to your wife, to women in your life, everybody can identify that the discrimination is real. That’s the baseline. Everybody has experienced discrimination, if not, unfortunately, violence and egregious forms of violence, insidiously, overtly. It’s really something that we have to reflect upon and really embrace our collective and individual roles to address. But certainly the 16 days of activism is a global opportunity and has been a calendar of events for some time now to look at how do we bring this spotlight. As we said this year we’re focusing on gender-based violence. But I have to say, anecdotally, I always feel like the more egregious crimes against women take place during the 16 days of activism, which is a terrible overlap. If it’s true, it definitely needs to be studied. But more than that, that femicide impacts every single country. The fact that women are murdered by their intimate partner. It’s not that they’re randomly selected. It’s that pregnant women are targeted because they’re pregnant. I mean, it’s so, you can’t reconcile it. And I don’t blame anyone for being overwhelmed by just violence as a whole, but really looking at how we can play a role in arresting this and reversing this. This does not have to be this way. And we’re losing so much potential in the number of women that we’re losing to gender-based violence.”

As it relates directly to violence against women, Chanona clarified that while violence goes both ways, a higher number of reports register women as victims.

Janelle Chanona, Women’s Parliamentary Caucus: “When we look at gender-based violence reports, we look at attacks against women, I would say that historically there is immediate response to, “okay, you can’t go out tonight I’m going to drop you there.” There’s this immediate I would say restriction or limit to women’s behavior. But women aren’t attacking women in alleys. Women aren’t waiting for them behind the door at home to beat them up. Women aren’t doing that in large part, but that’s an immediate reaction. So that in itself might be indicative of where we need to start in terms of the mindset of whose behavior do we need to, you know, when we look at who the average perpetrator is. But the other thing is, you know, can we even fathom that the cases that we hear about, the kidnapping, the murder, the murder with, you know, in front of the children, the murder of the mother and the children, or the woman and the child, those are the ones that get reported. Those are the ones we know about. Those are the ones, like I said, who have braved the system and braved, you know, any prospective reaction from society to come forward and let us know. You know, I hate to say that we know anecdotally those are not the worst cases that women have been enduring in Belize.”

The Women’s Parliamentary Caucus is a joint standing committee made up of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The caucus was formed in May 2023 with a view to foster discussions on gender issues and equality.  It is currently made up of nine women in parliament.