Protection of Rape Victims
Rape and other forms of gender-based violence have continued to be a major hindrance to the holistic development of women and girls in a safe, respectful and caring place. The increase in the levels of human rights violations, especially as it relates to women and girls in our society has signal an urgent need for policy makers to ensure that victims have all the legal, social and political protection that is necessary. Alarmingly, there are an overwhelming number of unreported cases in which the victims live in constant fear of their lives. More so, these innocent victims face unprecedented and overbearing challenges in their effort to recover from these traumatic experiences.
Ms. Felicia Browne who is a human and gender rights advocate believes that, what we are observing in the case of St. Vincent and Trinidad are some of the traditional difficulties that rape victims endure when the justice system has failed them. Too often, she states, victims are blamed for their rape or chastised by persons who may not understand the traumatic experiences that they suffer at the hands of the rapist.
“How long will we make victims criminals for speaking out on the injustice that have been done to them?” she asks. And how often will young girls be raped and murdered, while certain sectors in our society continue to chastise them for being a female? This type of behavior and culture must stop, she says. “It should not continue to plague the lives of our women and girls. We should provide the protection that is needed –legal, social and political.
Ms. Browne says, that no government should allow any of its citizens to violate the rights of others- especially women and children with impunity. It is very disturbing when such matters are dismissed or used as political mileage- rather than to utilize the experiences of rape victims as an opportunity to make the necessary interventions that are desperately needed within the Caribbean region. There is nothing more harmful that to reveal the identity of a victim- in particular one who wishes to have remained anonymous.”
Ms. Browne is of the belief that the absence of effective legislation to protect gender-based violence victims is a further violation of their rights to be safe and secure in their person. The government and human agencies should enact legislation that will severely punish the offenders of such unconscionable acts against our women folk regardless of their social, economic and political station in society.
Women and children should be protected against all forms of violence –including public ridicule by government officials. There is no justice in rape shaming or the deprivation of State protection for victims. The use of social media and other mediums to silence the voice of victims should become something of the past. We should work collectively to ensure that women’s rights are upheld by the State and citizens. This is no justification in shaming victims of rape –or the need to silence them.
Barbados Underground 
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I have read what Ms Felicia Browne wrote sometime back in March on this same subject. I commented on it then. Only this time I honestly feel that the reason why no much is done in these situations regarding the rights of women and children in these situations are based on people in Government aren’t without guilt themselves.
Because how can anyone who claim to LOVE his mother, still yet do such to other women? This is truly unbelievable, and unconscionable, that in this day and time that women still seem to be treated as LESSER than men.
No man has the right to treat any women with less than RESPECT, PRIDE and LOVE. It was a WOMAN who took the chance on her life to give birth to YOU. Or even to bear a child for YOU. This treatment of WOMEN and CHILDREN,
MUST STOP RIGHT NOW. NOT LATER BUT SOONER THAN LATER, WHICH TO ME IS NOW
We as men should truly be a shame to sit or stand around and do NOTHING in resolving this very serious matter. It saddens me as a man, that any man who is A REAL MAN, can stand around doing NOTHING, and feeling that this is acceptable;
The sad part to this is that even pets are treated better than some WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
How can you call yourself believers in THE MOST HIGH, and not understand that when you DISRESPECT, AND HARM WOMEN AND CHILDREN, that you are also DISRESPECTFUL towards THE MOST HIGH?
This has been going on now for too long, and it seem that you want this to remain a way of life for WOMEN AND CHILDREN to continue to be treated.
Ms Felicia Browne, you have my support 110% in helping in anyway that I can to get MEN to see and understand that this is UNACCEPTABLE.
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@ Mr. C
You said somewhere in your submission that you would have commented on a former article by Ms. Browne and you felt that there was no sense in rehashing that issue.
Probably this is the same reason that others may have seen this article and, much like the 12 submissions that the article on the killing of Guyanese anti-PPP government activist, former Guyana Defense Force Officer Courtney Crum-Ewing solicited, this article has only gotten two responses, yours and mine.
Which does not mean that it is not important but that it is a subject that the majority of us males, who constitute 80% of the rapists, seem to condone because it is a part of us.
You made the impassioned plea regarding females being our mothers and wondered how we could do this to another person’s mother or sister.
But Mr. C. I would in the same vein of “one hand does not clap” suggest to you that how could someone do this to our fathers??
You will ask, do what, and of course some would think that I am referring to males who have been raped but I am not.
I am referring to the training/indoctrination or generic brought-upsy that is afforded male children in the homes of generally “Single Female Heads of Household” that exist woldwide and abound in our “sowing of wild oats” culture through the Caribbean islands.
I am talking about what happens before the rapes and domestic violence and what the females in your “picture of innocence” support by dint of sins of ommission.
“My son is a good looking boy and he got a lot of girls calling he heah at my house”
Here, Mr, C we have the same mothers, and females, “the hands that rock the craddle and rule the world”, the womb that bore and continues momentarily to bear, these potential rapists, encouraging these males to practice this lack of respect for 80% of the rape victims, from the time the umbilical cord is cut until the grave.
I will not set you the perpetual conundrum of “which came first, the chicken or the egg??” but of one thing I can be absolutely sure is that the “victims” in your souldly reasoned posit are in no small part contributors to the never ending issue of RAPE that exists today,
Once again this ole man does not claim to be any child psychologist and cannot like Lawrence Cohen, author of Playful Parenting, say things like “while inborn differences do exist, they are quite small but they are then nurtured and exacerbated by the way we treat girls or boys” but what I can say through these fleeting years here is that I have seen how subtle the liberties are and how these little drips of water, akin to Chinese Water Torture, slowly dripping on so-called impenetrable granite will, over the years, cause little pock marks in the surface which, aided by the abrasion of pebbles and rocks (TV, Grand Theft Auto and other internet enemies) have brought us to where we are.
So Mr. C. I like Voltaire will caution you that “every man (and woman) is guilty of all the good he did not do…”
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@ pieceuhderockyeahright April 9, 2015 at 9:55 AM
“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand That Rules the World” is as relevant today as it was in 1865 of Wallace’s time or even when the mythical Eve gave birth to the killer Cain.
How come the human female is the only reproductive side of specie that make up the animal kingdom in need of protection from out-of-season or forced advances from the staff side of human family tree?
We don’t see it in other mammals like the leopard, tiger, lion or even the elephant. Not even with the domesticated sheep, cow or pig. Is that the consequences of disobeying Yahweh by eating an innocent apple or was it an erectile shaped cucumber?
Why not let the likes of Mr. C focus his prayers for evolutionary social conversion on the females by demanding their refusal to accept the behaviours and advances on the boys on the block while guiding the minds of those in the cradle and at kindergarten.
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Brother Miller
I doubt that Mr. C or the Ms. Felicia Brown may return to their submissions barring the initial sound bite / byte here in these corridors
The think that is evident in your own writing is that the hand that cut your ass was as fluent as that that cut mine and, contrary to all that the world has tossed at us, we do not just lay down and die but fight against that which comes.
A few Sundays ago I was in church and an aspiring singer commenced a song, out of pitch with the organist and for the life of me, could not modulate their voice to the key of the organ.
But that karaoke-esque moment did not define the seriousness of the moment it was the fact that after two trials they just simply gave up and the item that was on the evening’s programme had to be abandoned in utero.
Absent was the determination that was instilled in us when, in travelling to a church far away from our own organist, where the pipe organ or the piano was out of tune and one was led down a vale of discordant noted, we were not only able to “rise or fall” to the occasion of cacophony but, more importantly, we did not run away from the stage.
These sheeple are bereft of any moral fibre, taught by children and given birth by children.
That “persevere in the face of adversity” spirit that was nurtured in we “old fogeys” that AC is so quick to want to passage to the other side, has, in spite of all their technological advances, perished in the fray of progress.
So the youthful Mr. C (if his gravatar is to be believed) will be quick to speak of the weakness of the female sex etc etc.
As to “the legend of the apple”, I am one who has imbibed the opiate of the people and, while not one of the Holy hands Crew, I absolutely believe in that which “the Eyes See not but which Liveth forever…”
I respect those of the fold who do not have such a beleif even though they cannot see the wind but believe in it nonetheless
As to what the apple was, your humble servant has another thought on that but such “heresy” is for another place and time, not here where “the weaker sex” is assuredly being made much weaker by these submissions.
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