Email

Print

Today is celebrated as International Women’s Day and a forum was held at the Biltmore called “Plotting a Way Forward: A Critical Look at the Women’s Movement and Gender Based Violenceâ€￾. Now there has been significant progress made as it relates to the Women’s movement, women’s rights and their independence, but a lot of women still face a troubling reality every day as it relates to abuse. And all those topics were discussed today. POWA which stands for Productive Organization for Women in Action is based in the Stann Creek district. The coordinator Michele Irving told us more about the organization and the alarming plight of women in the South.

Michele Irving - Coordinator POWA
"Our main work focuses on HIV support, gender based violence support, ending stigma and discrimination, issues of child abuse and violence and basically looking at gender equity and equality."

Courtney Weatherburne
"Those are very hefty, very broad topics, how is POWA addressing those issues particularly in Dangriga, what are some of the challenges that our Southern girls, those from Dangriga face in terms of all of these issues?"

Michele Irving
"Well, in the South especially the issue if HIV we look at what we refer to as the feminization of HIV, the national picture shows that there are more males infected than females, nationally, however in the Stann Creek we have more females infected, 3 to 1 a ratio of 3 to 1 and in that district we have the highest rate of death from AIDS so really we are looking at yes we are looking at our women in terms of that, we also have a higher, the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country where we are looking at a number of 84 out of 1000 as opposed to the national rate which is 64 out of 1000. The point of the discussion or the point of gender Justice is to look at the data try to see what it is telling us if we can’t see it clearly then do more research, do more you know analysis, investigation more interrogation of what is happening, we can’t just leave it as is."

The forum also addressed the struggles of Lesbians and bi-sexual women. PETAL which stands for Promoting Empowerment Through Awareness for Lesbian and Bi-Sexual Women , is also a key organization participating in today’s forum. The coordinator Simone Hill described some of the issues women of the LGBT community face and why it is important to fight for justice and respect.

Simone Hill - Coordinator, PETAL
"Well going onto Section 53 and bringing in the whole case we thought women were not affected by this but when we look at it, it’s like the whole society was affected by section 53 and what it spoke to. We had cases where women were attacked, now we are visible where we maybe we were invisible it was said at one time we were invisible or nothing happened to women of the LGBT community,  we realized that women were now speaking of how they were being stigmatized and discriminated  upon more and so you had pockets of that coming out, attacked, there was one woman who had been attacked by a guy, chased down the street by a guy with a 2x4 as she said it was."

"That is why we at Petal are documenting these stories of women so that when you talk about changing legislation you want to have something tangible to show the Government of Belize and Petal had done a needs assessment where it shows that a lot of women are in co-habitation status , you know a lot of women are living together , you know women of the community have children and so we must look, in Belize we must look at our LGBT citizens because we are citizens of this country, LGBT citizens, that’s it, we are citizens of this country and we are also human beings like yourself."

PETAL was formed in December 2015. There will be a number of other events for the rest of the month. 

Today's event was one of many in a month long calendar of countrywide activities to celebrate Women's Month.