Reverse policy on removing domestic violence victims'
ST AUGUSTINE
■ Vivian Bowen
vivian.bowen@trinidadexpress.com
A CALL for the reversal of the policy to remove the victim from the home in cases of domestic violence and intimate partner violence was made yesterday.
The recommendation was one of four made by president of the Law Association Lynette Seebaran-Suite, SC, when she spoke during a panel discussion at The University of the West Indies' (The UWI) 'Simulating Solutions: Mobili sing Expertise to Combat Crime and Criminality in Trinidad and Tobago', at the St Augustine campus yesterday.
Seebaran-Suite said the policy to remove the victim from the home came out of the Domestic Violence Act first initiated in 1991.
She said police were not to be blamed since they were just following the established protocol.
'The police are operating under a policy; they will very quickly pick you up in their motor vehicle and ask you if they can drop you by your mother or whether they can take you to a relative. But they are not advised, they are not empowered to remove the perpetrator from the home,' she said.
Seebaran-Suite indicated that the present policy sought to give the police the power to seek the welfare of the victim and, therefore, removing the victim from harm's way in the home.
She said this was something that needed to be changed.
'It is possible to reverse that policy and have the perpe trator removed from the home, and you will find in other jurisdictions that have this policy, it has a salutary effect on when the perpetrators decide to raise their hand to their intimate partner.' Seebaran-Suite said.
Even as she pointed out that Trinidad and Tobago had a very mature domestic violence legislative response compared to other parts of the world, Seebaran-Suite put forward three solutions to decrease the femicide numbers for the year.
She said that on average, the country saw 25 women killed by their intimate partner each year.
She noted there wasn't a problem with the domestic violence legislation or its structure, but more so its implementation.
Some of the other changes to the domestic violence order she put forward was one borrowed from the legislation in Barbados where any breach of the protection order was the prerogative of the victim rather than the police to initiate the process for the breach of the order by taking the matter to court.
Another recommendation dealt with removing the breach of the protection order from the general run of criminal offences and placing it in a domestic violence court.
She said special prosecutors should try these cases.
Her third solution dealt with bail.
She argued that the Chief Justice should set a policy as to when bail should be refused to a perpetrator.
