Moving beyond restraining orders: Govt. signals massive overhaul of 1996 Domestic Violence Law

A dark underbelly of escalating domestic violence killings is mowing through Guyana’s homes, ripping women away from their families and loved ones. Regrettably, the legal framework to tackle domestic violence in Guyana, established by the Domestic Violence Act 1996, has proven inadequate to protect victims. That is the perspective of Guyana’s Attorney General, Mohabir Anil Nandlall.

During a recent airing of ‘Issues in the News’, Nandlall stated, “Three decades after, by a sheer passage of time, [the Act] has become old and outmoded.” He declared that the Domestic Violence Act will be replaced by a more comprehensive Family Violence Bill. The new bill, he said, will not only encompass civil remedies but also introduce criminal sanctions against domestic violence offenders.

In Nandlall’s words, “Now, it will be a different type of legislation. Persons will go to jail for domestic violence offenses. Persons will be kept in custody, rather than be restrained from going into a house or a matrimonial home. They’ll be locked up.”

He also reinforced the need for a comprehensive legal overhaul by citing that the current law lacks the ability to keep the abuser away from the victim. “I know of a case where the domestic violence order was made by the magistrate. The magistrate made the order to exclude the man from the house. The man had the order in one hand, and he had a cutlass in the other hand. And he went and he chopped his wife,” Nandlall stated.

The government’s efforts are expected to be informed by empirical study. “Only when we can examine the causes of a problem can we really begin to address the problem,” Nandlall asserted. The study, slated to be undertaken by a qualified consultant, will examine a decade of killings (2013-2022), delving into factors like ethnicity, age, geographic location, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The results, Nandlall said, are likely to inform the crafting of the new bill.

In the first half of 2023, the nation witnessed a surge in domestic-related killings – nearly three times the amount recorded for the same period in 2022. According to the data, domestic killings formed the most prevalent category of killings in the first half of 2023, slightly outpacing ‘disorderly’ killings which had the highest statistic last year.

From January 1 to June 29, 2022, there were 13 domestic killings. Shockingly, this number jumped to 33 during the same period in 2023. Many of these cases were of women being killed by men they had relationships with. However, other kinds of domestic killings are also accounted for in this lot. Several attempts by Guyana Standard to disaggregate and gather further insight from the police, on statistics related to spousal killings of women this year, as well as over the past decade, proved to be a futile mission.

Spousal killings have nearly tripled in the first half of 2023, compared to the same period last year. This is recorded in the table attached, under the ‘Domestic’ category. The table compares the number of killings recorded in the period January 1 to June 29 in 2022 with the same period in 2023 (the current year).