On Sun­day (March 8), the world ob­served In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day. One of the themes this year was Give to Gain. Of course, as is to be ex­pect­ed, both in­ter­na­tion­al and lo­cal com­pa­nies pro­duced ad­ver­tise­ments that touched the hearts of their cus­tomers/fol­low­ers.

Women as­so­ci­at­ed with non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tions for the ben­e­fit of oth­er women made their an­nu­al state­ments and ac­knowl­edge­ments of how far women have come. In­deed, women have gone from seen and not heard to both seen and heard. Women in many in­stances now have equal rights with equal ac­cess. Yet, de­spite the long jour­ney, women re­main women’s worse en­e­my.

In Sun­day’s Guardian, I read an ar­ti­cle en­ti­tled “NGO wants jus­tice to speed up for women and girls”. I agree. As some­one who ap­pears in our court­rooms al­most every day rep­re­sent­ing women in some of the most chal­leng­ing times in their lives, I al­so wish the jus­tice sys­tem could speed up and bring them the re­prieve they need. The ar­ti­cle quot­ed a state­ment by the UN women’s web­site which stat­ed, “Women are turned away, not be­lieved, re­vic­timised, or priced out of le­gal sup­port. Equal­i­ty nev­er ar­rives.” This state­ment car­ries truth even in our le­gal sys­tem, but many times we refuse to ac­knowl­edge where this stems from.

Any­one who reads my opin­ion reg­u­lar­ly would be no stranger to some of my views and con­cerns. In mat­ters of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, cus­tody and main­te­nance, our laws and le­gal sys­tem were de­signed to func­tion at a faster pace.

In fact, the Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence Act re­quires that these types of mat­ters be heard with­in cer­tain spec­i­fied time­frames. One would be­lieve this means that such mat­ters would be dealt with ex­pe­di­tious­ly and ef­fi­cient­ly. No such luck.

Yes, we can blame the ju­di­cia­ry, the le­gal sys­tem, the gov­ern­ment and the list con­tin­ues. But, in my ex­pe­ri­ence, women should al­so car­ry blame.

Not a pop­u­lar opin­ion I am sure, but a truth­ful one. The Mag­is­trates’ Court dock­ets are over­whelmed with do­mes­tic vi­o­lence mat­ters. Should that dock­et be be­lieved, al­most every woman in T&T who is about to file for di­vorce, who has bro­ken up with the fa­ther of their child or who has been brought be­fore the court for cus­tody is­sues, are the vic­tims of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence.

There are so many base­less ap­pli­ca­tions brought by women ei­ther to use as a bar­gain­ing tool, or out of pure mal­ice or even for re­venge, that the gen­uine cas­es some­times ei­ther fall through the cracks or end up at the bot­tom of a long wait­ing less.

The ac­tions and be­hav­iour of women who are sim­ply at­tempt­ing to ma­nip­u­late the sys­tem, of­ten re­sults in women with gen­uine is­sues be­ing over­ly scru­ti­nised.

This be­hav­iour is not con­fined on­ly to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence mat­ters, but, sad­ly, ex­tends it­self to more se­ri­ous crim­i­nal be­hav­iour such as rape, sex­u­al as­sault and oth­er such of­fences.

Just a few months ago, I re­call a re­port by Ian Al­leyne where a man was al­leged­ly be­ing black­mailed by a young la­dy whom he had tak­en to a ho­tel. It was clear that if the man did not hand over the mon­ey be­ing de­mand­ed that a crim­i­nal re­port would be made against him. This is not as un­com­mon as one would be­lieve.

Sev­er­al years ago, I came across a mat­ter in which the woman re­port­ed her for­mer boyfriend for sex­u­al­ly as­sault­ing her daugh­ter. The facts of the mat­ter were that no such as­sault oc­curred and it was her means of aveng­ing the ter­mi­na­tion of the re­la­tion­ship.

When women act in such a man­ner, they are not sim­ply do­ing harm to the ex-boyfriend or ex-hus­band, or to some man who has done them harm.

What women are es­sen­tial­ly do­ing is harm­ing oth­er women. It does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that jus­tice is fail­ing to de­liv­er or jus­tice is too slow or jus­tice is re­vic­tim­is­ing. What it ac­tu­al­ly means is that jus­tice now has to weed out the gen­uine from false claims in a long list. Jus­tice must now, there­fore, prop­er­ly analyse the ev­i­dence of both false and gen­uine claims to en­sure that there is no mis­car­riage of jus­tice.

It means that valu­able re­sources that can be spent in oth­er ar­eas must be used to meet the grow­ing de­mands of the ju­di­cial sys­tem.

On In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day, we sit and for­ward greet­ings to all the women in our lives. We stand tall in the knowl­edge and thought of where women once were and the long jour­ney to where we now stand. This year, in tru­ly cel­e­brat­ing women, let us sup­port women in the best way we can.

Let us up­lift each oth­er and sup­port each oth­er. Let us con­sid­er be­fore fil­ing un­nec­es­sary mat­ters or ac­cess­ing lim­it­ed re­sources whether this is some­thing we tru­ly need or whether we are ham­per­ing the needs of oth­er women.