The Bureau of Gender Affairs plans in the coming financial year to do more work to help combat domestic violence in this country.
That’s the word from Patricia Boyce, Director of the Bureau of Gender Affairs.
According to Boyce, they recently formed a national committee on gender based violence, which she said is expected to meet as early as next month. She made the comments while responding to a question from the Minister of Labour and Social Partnership Relations, Colin Jordan, during the recent debate on the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure in the House of Assembly.
“One of the plans of that committee is to come up with a programme, a gender action plan on domestic violence and they are also going to be responsible for sensitising the public,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said that the Bureau will also be focusing this coming financial year on men and education and will be putting public awareness initiatives in place in that regard. According to Boyce, this effort is being pursued because there are statistics that show that a lot of males are choosing not to pursue tertiary education, which is quite the opposite where the females are considered.
“What we are hoping to do this financial year is to have a small group session with a number of men to get an idea of why they are not participating within the tertiary level, and then we can look at how we can use that information to devise a programme to help more men see the benefits of this tertiary education,” she added.
The Gender Affairs chief’s comments came as she spoke of the heavy workload of the department, which she explained has quite a limited staff complement. In addition to herself, Boyce indicated that there is one researcher officer and one programme officer.
“The amount of work that we need to do or we are required to do, it is difficult and it is challenging if there is only one person. If one person is out and no one comes to replace that person, then the other officer now [their] work doubles,” she stated.
As such, she said they have been engaged in a lot of collaboration with other entities. Among those they have worked with in recent times, she said, is the Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology. She said they were able to engage around 35 young men, giving them information on what is HIV and how risky behaviour can make them susceptible to the virus.
(JRT)