“Look. It’s like a prison inside,” “Kuini”, a young working woman, told a researcher in Suva, the capital of Fiji. She was looking at a photograph of two women talking. One standing under the doorway of her village home, a man watching them intently from inside the house. A scowl on his face, eyebrows furrowed — anger directed at the women.
The image was one of a series prepared with a local theatre group. Shot in and around Suva and featuring local actors, the photographs captured stories gathered by the group about the situations that can trigger gender violence in families or the broader community. They were then used in research with just under 300 women from Fiji, Bougainville and Kanak communities in New Caledonia, which explored how rules on gender violence operate in their communities.
Women from Pacific Islands nations navigate extreme insecurity. It is estimated two in three women and girls will experience this violence from an intimate partner across their lifetimes. In the last decade many Pacific states have enacted legal reforms on this issue but with limited impact. It is often assumed stronger law and order responses will be the key to reducing violence. Yet this ignores the challenges surrounding effective implementation of these laws and, equally, the views women themselves hold about rules that promise to uphold their security.
