Y.E.S. to Champion Proposed Charges for Domestic Abusers

Karen Cain

The campaign is only half of the Youth Enhancement Services’ initiative to tackle domestic violence. Cain says that YES will be submitting a position paper to cabinet with proposed changes on how domestic violence is tackled. One of the main points is to seek to proceed with the investigation and charges even when a complainant withdraw a charge against the perpetrator or refuses to make a report. Here’s how she explains it.

Karen Cain, Executive Director, Y.E.S.

“So, we are looking to say basically to the law, which is going to be very unpopular, because we are asking the state to take up the task to press charges against perpetrators instead of leaving that to the victim. The victim at times is very intimidated and they look to that perpetrator for that meal ticket because maybe she is not working and so he is the one with the finance and so there are a lot of factors. At the end of the day we want to look at how that is possible and what we will do in the next couple of months we are going to come up with a position paper and highlight how we want that done and present it to the government and ask the general public for support.  What we are hoping for is that the woman doesn’t have the right to say that she doesn’t want to press charges if we can get that nuh, because that is going to be very tricky as well. But if she doesn’t have that voice to say I don’t want to press charges, remember we are asking the state to take up that responsibility. Then, she can. And the reason we are thinking along that line is for a fact we know women are threatened that if they go through with it they will be killed and so on and so there are women are afraid.  I am not going to say this is going to be easy and we will have some women who might be in opposition of what we try to do and we will take it with a grain of salt too because we cannot please everybody else at the same time bit this is what we hope to bring for the betterment of most women.”