The Papua New Guinea government must “step up to the plate” and address the epidemic of family and sexual violence which is mainly being tackled by NGOs and grassroots activists, Human Rights Watch has said.
Among recommendations in a comprehensive new report released on Wednesday, the not-for-profit organisation called for the PNG government to take immediate action and implement its two-year-old family protection legislation, increase public awareness of family violence, and ensure police fully investigate crimes and arrest perpetrators. Change was needed at all levels, including courts.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) also urged international donors and institutions to publicly and privately lobby for action by the government, assist in policy development and expand frontline, NGO and grassroots services. In 2012-13 Australia provided about 74% of the $660m in development assistance for that year, and has previously invested $150m in justice reform.
In the report, based on interviews with 46 women, HRW said PNG was “failing to meet its obligations under international law to protect women and girls from discrimination and family violence” 20 years after ratifying the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women.
“The PNG government really needs to step up to the plate and put more resources in,” Elaine Pearson, HRW’s Australia director, told Guardian Australia.
“PNG is not an extremely poor country. They have money there that could be used – they just had the Pacific Games.
“If they have money to build all these infrastructure and stadiums for a regional sporting event, then surely they can set aside money in the budget to build safe houses.”
Victims and advocates face numerous obstacles, including dependence on their spouse, geographic isolation, a lack of medical care and community support and the high cost of accessing it, and poor police response.
While there has been progress in the sector, with anti-violence awareness programs, counselling hotlines, medical care and safe houses, family and sexual violence remains rife and largely unpunished.
Papua New Guinean woman Jenella told HRW she had endured more than two decades of abuse at the hands of her husband. She said the violence escalated after he took a second wife, who also assaulted her.
The 39-year-old mother of seven said she had gone to police 17 times seeking intervention but had received no help.
“I brought my husband to the police station and the police said, ‘You have so many kids – you should go back and not do this again.’ I wanted them to put him in jail for one or two years,” the report quotes Jenella as saying.
Among HRW’s recommendations is for the government to initiate comprehensive data gathering on family violence. Aside from interview-based reports such as HRW’s, the only comprehensive survey was published in 1992. It found family violence was occurring in more than two thirds of households but advocates and activists say it remains “pervasive.”
Pearson said the organisation “didn’t have to search far” to find women with similar stories to Janella’s about police non-responsiveness.
“Part of it is certainly a lack of resources [for police] – we often heard the excuse that there was not fuel to go in the car in order to get to villages where incidents took place,” Pearson said.
“But at same time there’s a lack of orders coming from the top [of the police force] to prioritise these cases. Family violence has not been given priority despite the fact that a law was passed more than two years a go. A lot of police in the highlands say they still have not received the charge sheet to prosecute family violence under the new law.”
The HRW report says: “While travel to remote areas of the country can be challenging, it is feasible. The government should make it clear to police officers that they must travel wherever necessary to investigate crimes and arrest perpetrators. The government also should ensure that police have sufficient resources to do so, and prohibit police from demanding that crime victims and NGOs pay them money for fuel and meals.”
Recent years have been tumultuous for the PNG government, and particularly its police executive. It has been dogged by corruption allegations, scandals, and an investigation which prompted an arrest warrant for the prime minister, Peter O’Neill. Several high ranking police officers, commissioners and the attorney-general lost their jobs.
But Pearson said this was not an excuse for the lack of enforcement at the station level, where politics did not trickle down. While it had been harder for police to deal with a range of issues, family violence was “the cases they’re seeing day to day”.
“We saw queues of women outside some stations waiting to be seen. It’s no surprise that in some cases women just give up and think: I can’t see the police if I have to wait here for a full day, so what’s the point.”
Protection orders worked when they were issued, Pearson said, but police officers were too heavily focusing on counselling and mediation instead of rescuing women from horrifically violent relationships.
Within gender-based violence issues in PNG is the growing issue of sorcery-related attacks.
Monica Paulus, a PNG women’s rights activist who works to rescue women who have been accused of sorcery, said there was a key difference between the two forms of family violence. Paulus has worked in the sector for about 20 years, and was herself accused of sorcery by family members.
“With my experience with sorcery-related violence, when it’s domestic violence you can also see support from family and community for the woman, but when it’s a woman accused of sorcery she automatically loses the family and community support.”
However Paulus also pointed to parallels in the two issues. The government had also stalled after enacting legislation against sorcery-related violence, failing to implement or enforce it.
“There are the basics they should be providing, so when you look at it, there’s not enough service providers, and also with the networking of the services, the safety net has not been created by the government,” she said.
Non-government organisations, civil society groups, and community activists like Paulus were filling the “void” left by an absence of government funding and conducting lifesaving work, Pearson said.
“[But] there’s all sorts of gaps, whether legal aid, counselling, hotlines, as well as shelters and safe houses,” she said.
“One of the really key recommendations is that we think these organisations need more funding and certainly need that funding from the PNG government.”
