‘Women are not made to be hit’

Police officers and social workers in the Caribbean learn how to help families afflicted by domestic violence

By Paul Constance

"She was afraid to press charges against her husband," says deputy inspector Armand Letterboom, recalling the case of a woman who was repeatedly beaten by her spouse.

The woman’s case was typical, according to this veteran police officer in Paramaribo, Suriname. Her husband would come home from work tired, and a small incident would escalate into a violent argument. Eventually he would hit her, as he had practically since the beginning of their marriage. And yet the woman was reluctant to take her husband to court because he was the sole breadwinner for her family, and because she knew the chances of a judgement in her favor were slim.

Letterboom did something that is still unusual among policemen in many Latin American and Caribbean societies. He listened to the woman at length. Eventually, he arrested her husband and made sure he spent the night in jail. And the next day, before the man was released, he had a long talk with him, too. "I told him that women are not made to be hit, but to be loved," Letterboom recalls.

Though he has always sympathized with the plight of abused women, Letterboom says in the past he was not always able to be a very effective advocate on their behalf. Nor was he willing to take a proactive approach and actually talk with the abusive partner in a relationship. The problem, he says, was ignorance about the social and psychological reality of domestic abuse, and about what can be done to prevent it.

Things began to change in 1998, when Letterboom attended a training workshop on domestic violence intervention financed by the IDB. The workshop, which was carried out by the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) and the Helsinki Consultant Group, offered an overview of the causes and extent of domestic violence in Suriname and elsewhere. There were sessions on why battered women may be hesitant to seek help, and how unspoken but deeply rooted cultural biases can be used by abusers to escape punishment. Finally, participants learned how social services, including law enforcement, can intervene in ways that protect women and children without exacerbating the problem.

The workshop had a decidedly practical focus, with sessions on recognizing the signs of domestic violence, helping victims of abuse to talk about their problem, and collecting physical samples for possible DNA evidence. Other sessions focused on the role of social workers in assisting families damaged by domestic violence. Altogether, 460 of the 1,100 police officers who comprise the police force of Suriname, plus 160 local social workers, attended the workshops. Since then, an additional 112 police officers and social workers have been trained in a continuing program run by CAFRA.

"You are never too old to learn something," recalls Letterboom. "[The workshop] gave me some new tools to deal with victims. For example we learned than [in abusive relationships] there is a breaking point. There comes a moment when a woman can’t take the violence any more. But in the past [we] policemen didn’t know about this process, so most of the time we would just send these women back to their husbands."

Letterboom says one of the most important lessons he learned at the workshop concerned the importance of genuinely listening to a woman’s story, instead of reacting immediately based on preconceived assumptions. "I’ve learned that I really need to listen to the woman’s needs, even if she comes in daily," he says. "I know I have to, because this is a serious problem".

Statistics provided by the Suriname Police Corps led researchers to conclude in 1994 that 69 percent of Surinamese women had experienced violence in a conjugal relationship. Legally married women seemed to have a lesser risk of domestic violence than those in common-law marriages, but otherwise the incidence of domestic violence was consistent regardless of ethnicity, geography (urban/rural) and employment status. In 1997, more than 17 percent of the violent offences recorded by the Suriname Police Corps were classified as domestic violence. Similar levels of domestic violence are believed to exist in many other Caribbean countries.

But as staggering as these statistics are, they reveal only the tip of the iceberg and fail to give a true indication of the magnitude of the problem. This was the conclusion of a report entitled They Are Crying for Help — A Survey of Institutions Working in the Field of Relief and Support of Female Victims of Domestic Violence, which was commissioned by the IDB in June 1998, prior to the workshops.

As word of the successful Suriname workshops spread, police officials and women’s rights activists in nearby countries expressed interest. In 1999, the IDB financed a conference in Paramaribo on "Building a Culture of Human Rights in the Caribbean," that addressed the legal and institutional framework of women’s rights, the nature and frequency of crimes against women and services available to women. Following the conference, the Association of Caribbean Commissioners of Police (ACCP) invited the Suriname Commissioner of Police and the local CAFRA representative to describe their efforts at the association’s annual meeting. Reactions to their presentations were so positive that before the meeting was over, plans were underway to develop a regional domestic violence intervention training program for police and social workers, based on the Suriname workshops.

The IDB, through its Finnish Trust Fund, eventually agreed to provide a total of $300,000 in technical cooperation funds to help finance the first two stages of a three-stage regional program. The first stage consisted of developing the Train the Trainers Manual, based on materials used in the Suriname workshops and additional resources developed by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and Oxfam of Canada as part of the Caribbean subregion’s contribution to the United Nations Inter-Agency Campaign on Women’s Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. This manual, which was designed and tested in April 2000 with extensive input from CAFRA and the ACCP, was then used to train 160 police officers and 40 social workers from the English-speaking Caribbean in the second stage of the project. The training was carried out in two phases, first in Trinidad and Tobago (June 2000) and subsequently in Jamaica (July 2000).

Now, these 200 "trainers" will fan out to each of the Caribbean’s English-speaking countries and conduct additional training workshops. This third stage of the program is being financed by the Caribbean Development Bank, the U.K. international development agency (DFID) and inkind contributions from the ACCP and is already underway. Over the next year, an estimated 23,000 police officers and 3,000 social workers from throughout the Caribbean will be trained in domestic abuse intervention thanks to the program.

Keith Evans, the IDB’s representative in Paramaribo, says it has been gratifying to see the original Suriname workshops evolve into such a far-reaching initiative. "In addition to providing police officers and social workers with concrete skills for helping victims of domestic abuse, this new program is raising awareness of the problem in a society as a whole," Evans says. "There is reason to be hopeful that these training efforts will help to put domestic violence on the political radar screen as well, where it could translate into policy initiatives that address the roots of the problem."

Date posted: March 2001

Training in Trinidad...

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