Al­most half of the women who were mur­dered last year in T&T were vic­tims of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.This was dis­closed by fam­i­ly at­tor­ney Lynette See­baran-Suite yes­ter­day as she launched the Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence Ad­vi­so­ry Clin­ic at the of­fice of the T&T Group of Pro­fes­sion­als As­so­ci­a­tion, Fitz Black­man Dri­ve, Port-of-Spain.The clin­ic was launched as part of 16 days of ac­tivism in com­mem­o­ra­tion of In­ter­na­tion­al Day for the Elim­i­na­tion of Vi­o­lence Against Women which was cel­e­brat­ed on No­vem­ber 25.See­baran-Suite said po­lice records showed 33 women were mur­dered and 16 of the killings were re­lat­ed to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.

Ad­dress­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives of var­i­ous Gov­ern­ment and non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions, she said do­mes­tic vi­o­lence against women had moved to a new bru­tal lev­el.She said some­times twice a month one heard on the news that a woman was killed through do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.See­baran-Suite be­lieves this goes back to gen­der is­sues but al­so feels it is re­lat­ed to "gaps" in the re­spons­es to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.She re­called that the "first gen­er­a­tion" re­sponse to the is­sue cen­tered around bring­ing it out of the bed­room and in­to the pub­lic do­main.

The "sec­ond gen­er­a­tion" re­sponse was the cre­ation of leg­is­la­tion, like the Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence Act and the Sex­u­al Of­fences Act, and the for­ma­tion of sev­er­al groups and a hot­line to deal with re­ports.The "third gen­er­a­tion" re­sponse deals with hav­ing a prop­er fol­low-up pro­gramme with vic­tims af­ter they have re­port­ed the mat­ter to the po­lice and tak­en re­strain­ing ac­tion against the per­pe­tra­tor.See­baran-Suite said ex­ist­ing sys­tems need­ed to be strength­ened.

Head of the Po­lice Ser­vice's Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence Unit, Mar­garet Samp­son-Brown, who al­so ad­dressed the gath­er­ing, said she had re­quest­ed 15 ad­di­tion­al of­fi­cers.Samp­son-Brown said when the unit was first formed in 2008, they had 20 of­fi­cers who re­spond­ed to every re­port of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.She said nine of the of­fi­cers even­tu­al­ly left but they were able to bring back their num­bers to 20.The unit has in­ter­viewed an ad­di­tion­al 15 of­fi­cers who were just wait­ing on ap­proval to be ap­point­ed, she said.

Samp­son-Brown dis­closed that they were work­ing, at present, in the re­mote east Trinidad com­mu­ni­ty of Matelot.She said of all the in­cest re­ports the po­lice re­ceived, Matelot had the high­est. She said there were 17-year-old moth­ers in the area.She said the unit re­cent­ly walked house-to-house in the com­mu­ni­ty try­ing to di­a­logue with res­i­dents and was able to es­tab­lish a won­der­ful re­la­tion­ship with them.Pover­ty and some lev­el of il­lit­er­a­cy were iden­ti­fied as prob­lems and she said the unit was seek­ing to bring a li­brary to the area to en­cour­age read­ing.