Industrial Court president Deborah Thomas-Felix says T&T needs “to get up, speak up and stand up against all forms of injustice,” as the country continues to witness and experience the rapid transformation of society from a peaceful nation to one plagued by continued violence and injustice against women, men, boys and girls.
Thomas-Felix made the comment at the thanksgiving service and launch of International Women’s Day 2018 at the Holy Trinity Church, Port-of-Spain, yesterday.
The event, themed, Get Up, Stand Up, Speak Up For Gender Justice, was hosted by the Network of NGOs for the Advancement of Women.
Thomas-Felix said in 2017 the issue of child marriage, which challenged the age of marriage under Hindu, Muslim and Orisha law for girls from as low as age 12, was debated in parliament and in several quarters across the country.
She said while it could be argued that the figures for children and teenagers who actually got married were relatively low, with UNICEF estimating that two per cent of girls were married by 15 and eight per cent by 18, she noted that Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi had cited a figure of 3,478 child marriages which occurred in T&T between 1996 and 2016.
“And I wondered why does this issue require debate? To compound the problem, of that figure, as the Attorney General informed, 3,404 were girls while 74 were boys under the age of 18, illustrating the pervasive influence of long-standing beliefs about the role of the girl child and that of women,” Thomas-Felix said.
“The fact that such laws were retained for so long and have been defended in some quarters may suggest first, a degree of societal comfort at some level with the philosophy and value system supporting child marriage; and second, a lack of urgency on the part of those who govern and society to seriously address the overall treatment of women and girls, especially in the areas of domestic violence and abuse.”
She said this also underscored one key instrument in the arsenal against gender-based inequities, which was the continuous examination of the law and our legal framework with a view to identifying areas for change.
“This must be put on the front burner and at the forefront of any decision we make as NGOs and as policy makers. The reason is that the issue is not only one of gender justice; for me, it is one that speaks to fundamental human injustice in the context of our broader human rights commitments,” Thomas-Felix said.
She said any action, law and value system in any society which rendered a woman inferior resulted in violence against all and constituted a grave violation of the fundamental tenets of not just gender injustice, but was a form of systemic, structural, accepted violence and injustice that has decimated and continues to eviscerate citizens daily.