Margaret Hagen-Wood.

Lessons learned

How a police chief became a "born-again feminist"

By Margaret Hagen-Wood

This project is the story of how a small group of people committed to a common goal can have enormous impact. The story starts in Suriname with IDB Country Representative Keith Evans who sent the Chief of Police and a national feminist leader/local representative of CAFRA from Paramaribo to Washington to attend an IDB Conference on Domestic Violence. The police chief came back a "born-again feminist" (his words) and the feminist mobilized the activist NGO community in support of the police chief’s request for training for all of his police force in domestic violence prevention. Enter the IDB loan officer from Washington, also a believer, who approached the IDB Finnish Trust Fund for money for the project. It just so happens the government of Finland had just made domestic violence prevention a major goal of its social policy and was very supportive of the project in the Caribbean.

After the success of the Suriname project, the police in Aruba asked the Surinamese police for help in training police in the countries of the Dutch-speaking Caribbean, and CAFRA sought to expand the project to the rest of the Caribbean. The project began to gain momentum, picking up support and financing along the way from six other international organizations and the private sector. Most importantly, it also gained the endorsement of the regional police commissioners. Now plans are in place to train some 30,000 police and social workers in 17 countries in the English-speaking Caribbean. (See main article).