Transcript
OFA GUTTENBEIL-LIKILIKI: Nothing much has progressed in the area of ending violence, all forms of violence against women and girls. And when we look at the Pacific we have some of the highest numbers in terms of intimate partner violence. And so it is not getting any better, our figures are actually increasing and so one of my objectives being here is moving away - you know we have got into this whole silly business of naming violence against women in terms of violence against women, gender based violence, domestic violence and categorising the types of violence and giving more importance to one over the other - that is what has happened over the last ten years and we have to move away from that. Unfortunately and sadly we are seeing from countries that it is now becoming an issue of violence against women and men, violence against girls and boys. We are not making any improvement in the area of women and girls because we have been basically confused over the last decade we haven't been putting the woman's experience as the centre of our work.
SALLY ROUND: Do you think you've managed to re-set that in any way in the presentation that you have given?
OGL: Yes. As a civil society representative here, I've tried my best through my presentation, but again it's up to the ministers whether they take it or not. If we're serious about the 2030 agenda, we have to start doing things differently, we have to think outside of the box. We have to go back to where we started, where we placed the woman, the survivor, in the centre of our focus. Her experience would tell us: what are the challenges, what are the gaps, what are the violations, and what the solutions should be. Sometimes at these meetings, things can be ideas and solutions that are technical in nature, where these are adaptive challenges. Its challenges that we have to change - attitudes, mind-sets, behaviours - and technical solutions can't change that overnight or can't change that in the framework of five to ten years. So we really have to look at what are the core fundamental issues that we have to have to address and have consensus on, that we have to all move together as a commonwealth to address. One of the other things that I raised in my presentation was, we need to move away from all these campaigns. There's way too much investment in these campaigns to end violence against women - the White Ribbon Campaign, the He for She Campaign, the Orange Campaign - there's millions of dollars being poured into those campaigns when it should be poured into more substantive work. For example the Judicial Bench Book, that we've just seen that's been launched for East Africa, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do that across the Pacific? Or curricular reform from the education system, class one to class six. We need to start teaching our young boys and our young girls in the classroom that they are equal to each other because, at the end of the day in the Pacific when that little boy and that little girl goes home, they're walking into a house where the father believes he's superior to the mother. And so the school needs to provide that education, to challenge that and to get the child thinking, at a very early age, that they're equal to each other.
