VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS STILL A REGIONAL EPIDEMIC
Violence against women and girls remains a regional epidemic for women in the Pacific. Minister for Women, Children and Poverty Alleviation, Mereseini Vuniwaqa, made the comment while opening the Pacific Preparatory Meeting for Beijing +25 and the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) 64 at Holiday Inn, Suva, said. She highlighted how women and girls continued to experience multiple forms of violence at home, at work and in public spaces.
“It is important to recognise that violence against women and girls is an extreme manifestation of gender inequality in a society and systemic gender-based discrimination,” she said.
“Girls in the Pacific are still constrained by social norms including harmful practices like child marriage, deeply rooted gender roles, a widespread burden of unpaid care and domestic work, unequal power and voice and outright discrimination.
“They still have limited or zero access to friendly Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) information and services to assist them to make responsible choices to protect and safeguard their health and bodies, with particular reference to unplanned and early pregnancies,” the minister said.
Across the Pacific, she said men outnumbered women in paid and formal employment while women made up most of the population engaging in vulnerable and informal employment. She said women work more, earned less and had fewer choices about their livelihoods and futures with less access to resources and information.
In the Pacific region she said natural disasters were on the rise, both in frequency and ferocity. Climate crisis, she said was indeed inherently a justice issue—those who had contributed least to its causes suffered to date most from its effects - including Pacific women and girls.
She said in Beijing 25 years ago, they knew that they were making history together, because they were pushing the boundaries of what had been possible, and they were building a global consensus to advance gender equality and women’s rights that would serve as a blueprint for all the work ahead.
For her, she said it was for the same reason that the Beijing + 25 anniversary could not be ‘business as usual’.
“It shall give us clear direction on where our efforts must and will focus in order to deal, once and for all, with this greatest human rights violation, gender inequality,” the minister said.
She urged the participants that as Pacific Island Countries, they needed to commit to a few things – (i) be united in full reaffirmation of the Beijing Platform of Action. (ii) build stronger regional consensus to advance gender equality and (iii) form coalitions that will take meaningful actions forward with urgency and accountabilityregionally and globally.
She assured the participants that the Fijian Government was committed to work with all of them in this endeavour.