'Stop violence against women'
 

by S.S. Wijeratne

"Women child, O'Lord of men may prove to be a better offspring than a male" - The Buddha to king Pasonadi.

A newspaper reported recently a 32 year old woman farm worker was brutally assaulted by her husband who had accidently added extra salt in his curries. Similarly in 1961 the three Mirabel sisters in the Dominican Republic who protested against dictatorship were killed on orders of President Rafail Trujillo. This started informal movement of women to protest against violence which UN officially recognised in 1999, and declared November 25 as the 'International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women'.

According to a UN Report, "Worldwide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime. Depending on the country, 25 to 75 per cent of women are regularly beaten at home. Over 120 million women have undergone female genital mutilation. Rape has devastated women, girls and families in recent conflicts in Rwanda, Cambodia, Liberia, Peru, Somalia, Uganda and the former Yugoslavia".

Sri Lankan women forms 52 per cent of the population and earn the largest amount of foreign exchange through their sweat as foreign domestic workers, pliable underpaid workers, garment sweat shops and as tea pluckers for the last 100 years in hill country estates.

Sinhala media reports regularly details of horror stories, violence against women, trafficking from tsunami camps, forced conscription to be used as cannon fodder, trafficking to foreign slavery on the pretext employment. Sri Lankan male dominated government in the past had shown marked reluctance to take any meaningful steps to stem the rot.

Foreign domestic employment is the heaven for legitimised trafficking in women and practice of violence against female dignity. But successive governments failed to take steps to negotiate safe employment contracts for their vulnerable domestic servants fearing the sources of valuable foreign exchange may get affected.

Since 1995, few legislative attempts were made by the male dominated Parliament to protest against violence against women. The 1995 amendment brought to the Penal Code in Sri Lanka, creating penal offences for sexual harassment, abuse of children and incest has by and large remained unimplemented in the penal code for the last 10 years.

I am yet to see a recorded case of sexual harassment in the private sector being prosecuted or harassed women commuters in public transport protected. Pompous legislation is meaningless if the victims are in fact not protected.

The police consider female violence as a cultural trait and not a violation of the dignity of women. To add insult to injury, the law enforcement officials blame the so called foreign funded feminist NGOs for tarnishing the image of this resplended island, where once upon a time a beauty queen bedecked with jewellery could travel from Kayts to Matara unharmed. We as a nation doles out of chunks of antedoted history whilst trying to avoid the problems at hand.

I read with optimism President Mahinda Rajapakse's 'Mahinda Chintanaya' about the section dealing with 'Diriya Kantha' where he correctly analyses that 'empowerment of women lead to empowerment of the entire society'. Manifesto promises a 'Kantha Pilisarana' to assist the women victims of violence tsunami or ethnic conflict.

The Legal Aid Commission (LAC) and National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) will take steps to ensure that these are not just election promises and assist the Executive head of the country to implement these programmes.

The enactment of the Act to Prevent Domestic Violence (34 of 2005) few weeks prior to the Presidential Election, if implemented will seriously create a culture of non violence against women. The Legal Aid Commission has already published a booklet on the new law and has assured the public that LAC lawyers would provide free legal assistance to violence victims to reduce this national scourge.

LAC and NCVC have conducted number of awareness programmes about gender based violence at provincial level and through the courtesy of social responsible print and electronic media.

In order to stop the Prevention of Domestic Violence Law impotent like the 1995 Penal Code Amendments, LAC and NCVA will jointly start a "White Ribbon" campaign from 25 November to mark the 'International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women" for 16 days until 10 December, International Human Rights Day, to create awareness to take strong measures to implement the new law.