Abstract
Gender violence is one of the greatest challenges to peace and security in Pacific Island Countries. The persistence of this problem is often linked to the limits of state-based policing authority. It is argued that this approach fails to grapple adequately with hybrid systems of regulatory authority in Pacific Island Countries that include customary and faith-based forms of authority. Feminist inquiry into the difficulties Pacific women face in securing justice when they are the victims of gendered crimes frequently highlights the gendered failings of state and customary systems of justice, finding that both systems reflect and further entrench the subordinated status of women. This paper addresses the tension between the apparent limits of state-centred models of policing and the shortfalls of hybridised structures of regulatory authority. It reports a theoretically informed empirical study that investigated how ni-Vanuatu women understand gender violence and the role that police can play in its prevention. Using participant research and photo elicitation surveys, we asked 1) how does the authority of policing agencies operate when addressing violence against women in relation to other sites of international and local sociocultural authority in the Vanuatu context, and 2) how do women understand and value policing authority relative to other sites of regulatory authority? We found that, while police in Vanuatu operate in the context of constructive complementarity with other forms of authority, women valued police, identifying them as the key source of regulatory authority that could provide help if their partner became violent or if they were threatened.
Highlights
Gender violence has long been recognised as one of the greatest challenges to peace and security in Pacific Island Countries (PICs)
Using an innovative methodology that combined participant research with the use of photo elicitation surveys, we asked 1) how does the authority of policing agencies operate when addressing violence women in relation to other sites of international and local sociocultural authority in the Vanuatu context, and 2) how do women understand and value policing authority relative to other sites of regulatory authority? We found that, while police in Vanuatu operate in the context of constructive complementarity, women valued police and most often identified them as a source of regulatory authority that could provide help if their partners became violent or they were threatened
Women were identified as vulnerable to violence in the home or intimate partner relationships when their behaviour contravened gendered expectations— expectations that women assume a subservient role in domestic and family duties and limit autonomous activity in economic, social and community life. These results provide insight into how violence against women is understood by women in Vanuatu society and provide a context for our analysis that aimed to explore 1) how the authority of policing agencies is perceived to operate when addressing violence against women and girls in the Vanuatu context, and 2) how women understand and value policing authority relative to other sites of regulatory authority
Summary
Gender violence has long been recognised as one of the greatest challenges to peace and security in Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Years of reform addressing state and community responses to this issue have made little difference to prevalence rates (Bull, George and Curth-Bibb 2019) The persistence of this problem is often linked to the failure of policing. Writing about Solomon Islands, Geoff White stated that Pacific Island populations generally view statebased systems of authority as a ‘distant presence’ with an ‘uncertain relevance’ (2007: 6). This arguably affects how Pacific peoples understand the authority of state-based institutions of justice; in addition to being under-resourced and geographically limited, they may be viewed as ‘foreign’ or imported entities that lack local legitimacy (Forsyth 2009)
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