Domestic violence in Babel In two years

This is year 2013 drawing to end. The period of 2012 and 2013 has been a difficult stage for Bintelrafedain through the helping campaigns it ran to support women’s rights and counter violence against women and provide them with an honorable life. The most important campaign in this regard was the defense campaign to pressure Babel Provincial Council to pass a law that helps women and enables them to protect themselves and their children from domestic violence.
This campaign resulted in success when on December 12th 2012 the previous Babel Provincial Council voted to pass the bill put forward by Bintelrafedain Organization as the first local law for the Iraqi Provincial Councils to help women against domestic violence and was named “the Act of Helping Women against Domestic Violence”.
After this struggle a difficult journey began for this act to be brought to light and after sincere efforts done by the organization and Provincial Council activists who believed in the necessity of these kinds of rules to protect women and provide them with an honorable life, Babel Provincial Council succeeded then through its staff to get official agreements from the federal government and related ministries to establish a professional independent center to help women against domestic violence which included distinguished professional departments ran by specialists as stated in the provisions of the law. In May 30th 2013 a committee was appointed by Babel governor at the time Mohammad almasu’di to supervise this center and Bintelrafedain was a member of this committee.
But after the previous elections and the appointment of the new local government this law was the first to pay the price for ruling the country through parties and quotas rather than institutes and laws since this law along with all the accompanying administrative orders were lost through mysterious events which changed the independent specialized office ( according to the provisions of the law) to a “Unit of Domestic Violence” within the structure of the so-called Department of Gender in the Babel Provincial Council.
And I wonder how is domestic violence related to gender? Considering that all those who are in charge of this section are not specialized in the issues of violence in general and domestic violence in particular, and this is the first clear violation of the law which states that “The person who runs the section of help against domestic violence should have the experience of no less than five years in the field of domestic violence and that all employees in the this section should be specialized in psychology, sociology and law”. Therefore, this is what we miss now.
Bintelrafedain organization has put a study forward to Ms. Ahlam Rashed the head of the legal committee at Babel Provincial Council about the violations done by Babel Provincial Council which was not aware of the law and its provisions and the organization is now waiting to see what the legal committee will do in this regard.
Bintelrafedain organization, along with all the other lawyers, journalists and civil community activists who worked hard to enact this law, hope for a serious revision in the constitution and hope that the Provincial Council would succeed in establishing this department correctly and clearly despite the current vague picture. Because this is an essential step if the department is to provide services to women in the province and we hope that it goes beyond being a nice gesture without leaving any true impact in practice.