Women’s shelters suffered from ‘political’ renaming

Provincial govts can help with staff training, counselling services and security.

LAHORE:

Experts have sought a greater role for provincial governments in training staff and improving counselling services and security at institutions across the country that help women subjected to violence by their families.

This was observed during a consultative meeting of the National Commission on the Status of Women on the importance of women crisis centres.

The meeting was called to review a study carried out for the commission by Afiya Zia, S Akbar Zaidi and Shafi Ahmad of 12 centres in the country.

The study, titled The Importance of Retaining and Supporting Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women Centres recommends that facilities at existing centres be improved and more centres be set up in light of findings that more and more women were making independent decisions concerning marriage and inheritance. The study feared that the upward trend in exercise of freewill could lead to higher incidence of domestic abuse.

Khizr Shah of the Ministry of Human Rights recommended that the crises centres be attached to provincial government darul amaans.

The participants noted though the functions of shelter homes and crisis centres overlapped counselling services were available only at crisis centres.

Social Welfare Department Planning Director Muhammad Suleman told the meeting that currently there were 34 shelter homes working across the province under the government.

Justice (Retired) Nasira Iqbal stressed the need to revert to the original title of te centres. She said such projects should not be named after politicians. She was referring to the finding that service delivery at these centres had suffered due to their renaming.

Dr Farzana Bari, director of Women Studies Centre at Quaid-e-Azam University, and MPA Amna Ulfat also spoke on the occasion.

The study revealed that as many as 6,500 cases were handled at the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women Crisis Centres over the last five years. It stated that the highest number of violence cases had been reported from Mianwali (2,395). Sialkot stood second with 852 cases.

The Family Protection and Rehabilitation Centres were renamed to Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women’s Centres in 2008.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 4^th, 2011.