Signs of a shift in attitudes to sexual violence in Fiji

Transcript

The head of the Fiji Women's Crisis Centre says recent statistics on sexual violence in the country are disturbing, but the long-term outlook is slowly improving.

Last week, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions released its official rape and sexual offences statistics for July, with 45 incidents recorded. 24 people were charged.

Shamima Ali, a long-time women's rights advocate, says she suspects the number of reported incidents would only account for about 10 percent of sexual abuse cases in the country.

However, she told Jamie Tahana that she believes the statistics are skewed as more people are finally starting to come forward.

Shamima Ali Photo: SUPPLED

SHAMIMA ALI: Well we believe, that they are coming forward a lot more, we haven't done comparative studies so we really can't tell whether that's increasing, but my centres tell me that actually people are reporting a lot more and they're getting more confident about reporting and police responses are improving, there are many more people speaking out against such crimes so people are getting encouraged to come out and report. But I'd also like to say that there's 45 cases that we've seen, we still believe that this is about ten percent of what's really happening.

JAMIE TAHANA: What has brought this change, why are people feeling more confident to be able to come forward?

SA: There are programs in schools, churches, religious institutions are speaking out against this, and the government itself is taking leadership on this and they're beginning to say the right things about victim blaming, that they're going to be looking at the perpetrators, the courts are giving out harsher sentencing taking the offence of rape a lot more seriously, the police response has definitely improved, still room for improvement but a lot of improvement has happened. So I think these are the things and our work goes on, it's 30 years of work around the communities, the villages and so on, the government has its own zero tolerance programmes, so all these things put together is creating an environment where people are saying that this is wrong, and we need to report it.

JT: Harsher penalties, better police responses and zero tolerance and such are all well and good but that's very after the fact, what needs to happen to stop this from happening in the first place in Fiji?

SA: Yes, yeah definitely, people are talking about castration and death sentence and that isn't in any way going to help, anyway it isn't according to human rights and so on to do things like that, when we do have sentencing like that, the rapist will most likely kill the victim rather than let her live to tell the tale. I believe that we as a society have a lot of work to do, you know we really have to start respecting our women and girls, we have to give them equal opportunities, we have to stop victim blaming, because a lot of that still goes on about women's movements, women's dress, their behaviour, that still continues so we have to give a lot more support to women in our communities and so on, so I think once we start doing that and as a society start looking at ourselves, we can go a long way to prevention. The schools also have to do a lot of work, the teachers need to be trained, how to move this kind of education forward, what we do with our little boys particularly, teaching them principals of equality, human rights, these are the kinds of things that can bring about prevention.