• by IPS Correspondents (port of spain)
• Thursday, December 22, 1994
• Inter Press Service

PORT OF SPAIN, Dic 22 (IPS) - Caribbean governments are beginning to focus their attentions on ways to minimise domestic violence as more and more experts in the field link the act to poverty and structural adjustment.

Trinidad and Tobago led the way in 1991 passing laws that protect spouses and children from abusive mates. In 1992 Barbados and Belize introduced similar legislation and a draft bill on domestic violence is now before the Guyana parliament.

"Women who are marginally employed or unemployed and poor are abused more violently and more frequently than employed women," says attorney and women's activist Roberta Clarke.

"Also men who are marginally employed or unemployed abuse women more frequently and more violently than those who are fully employed."

According to economist Lloyd Best some 22.5 percent of Trinidadian households fell below the poverty line in 1992.

"The burden of joblessness has fallen on young people and on women," he added.

The region's unemployment rate just tops 20 percent with joblessness among the young and women running at twice that figure.

Structural adjustment programmes such as those running in Jamaica, Barbados and Grenada have concentrated on cutting state spending and mopping up liquidity in the system.

Additionally, with many of the mono-crop countries in the region earning less for their main products due to international price movements and adverse weather conditions which have limited output, poverty within the Caribbean is growing.

Since August 1991 when the domestic violence act was passed in this southern Caribbean country of 1.5 million people, the police say they have received some 8,000 reports from abused spouses.

Figures from Guyana show that two-thirds of all married women have been beaten by their husbands.

In July last year a U.N. study on the issue described as alarming the level of violence against women in the Caribbean and Latin America.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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