The Bureau of Gender Affairs is seeking to establish a uniformed data collection system for domestic/gender-based violence in Dominica. The agencies involved are: the Dominica Police Force, the Social Welfare Division, Legal Aid Clinic, the Dominica National Council of Women, the Statistical Division and the Bureau of Gender Affairs.
The purpose of the network is to ensure a uniform database exists where incidences of domestic violence are recorded. The Registry in turn will have the capacity to generate reports which will be disseminated to all partners and used for lobbing and advocacy for policy and programmes to address this problem. More specifically, the network is intended to achieve the following objectives:
- Develop profile of victims and perpetrators of domestic violence
- Understanding the frequency and incidence of violence
- Identify groups at risk
- Help develop intervention programmes
- Monitor the effectiveness of violence prevention and intervention activities
To this end, the Bureau of Gender Affairs engaged Dr Godfrey St Bernard, to perform the following:
- Develop a network of all relevant partners responsible for documenting reported cases of domestic and gender-based violence
- To identify the sources of relevant data (e.g. data bases from the Police, the courts system, social service providers and health institutions)
- Develop uniformed templates for data collection on domestic/gender based violence
- Define the core minimum information needed by participating agencies
- Define and develop the methodology and tools to capture and analyse the data from multiple sources
- Develop a method of uniquely identifying the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence to avoid duplication of incident-based reports
- Set up a computer-based programme at all relevant partner agencies for the purpose of collecting the data
- Train relevant personnel in various departments in the use of the software and in data management.
- Train relevant staff of various department in the use of the software and interpretation of information
- Train Bureau staff in data analysis and preparation and presentation of reports for users and policy makers