2 months ago
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Orange Walk District has emerged as the leading area in Belize with high gender-based violence (GBV) incidents per capita for the year, 2025. The troubling development has placed a renewed spotlight on the urgent need for intervention and support services. Minister of Gender Affairs, Thea Garcia-Ramirez, expressed deep concern over the statistics, emphasizing the need to look beyond the surface and look at the root causes.
Thea Garcia, Minister of Human Development: “Gender-based violence is still there. It’s still rampant. We’ve switched a little bit in that a couple of years back it was Corozal who had the most cases reported per capita and now it’s Orange Walk. I don’t think anybody is proud of being first on that list. So I think that the ministry is looking towards getting into a more holistic approach and ensuring that we step up the strategies that we already have and ensuring that we partner with other ministries to combat those things that cause gender-based violence, that are at the root causes of it, such as food insecurity, shelter. We are going to increase our advocacy network, we have gender-based violence advocates for those and try to revamp some of those programs that kind of lulled a little bit. But we’re going to inject more capacity building in it and we’re going to try to ensure that we train more across different ministries. We’re going to be reaching out to the Ministry of Home Affairs, Police are one of the first responders in that front line against gender-based violence, so is health and so we are going to try and work with them.”
Garcia-Ramirez also noted that it’s time to take a more proactive and inclusive approach. This will mean creating spaces for mentorship, accountability, and emotional support. Additionally, fostering an environment whereby prevention starts with education and empowerment for all genders
Thea Garcia, Minister of Human Development: “We’re also going to be taking a more proactive approach in that we’re going to start working with men and boys in order to prevent gender-based violence. The best way to bring down those numbers is to stop it before it starts by working with men and boys to ensure that they’re able to get proper guidance, mentorship, and just sort of sometimes have someone to help you deal with. A lot of times, gender-based violence and domestic violence is cyclical in the sense that if you, as a child, grew up in a home where that was present you don’t know what a healthy relationship between parents looks like and so you will emulate what you’ve seen and that will make it cyclical. And so it’s just a vicious cycle. And so in order to break those cycles we need to have interventions with young men and boys by other men and young men and older men that will be able to teach them that that is in fact not how you conduct relationships and to show them what healthy relationships look like and to teach them and talk to them about gender-based violence, the effects, long-term not only on their relationships, but on their children. Usually once young men are really in those kinds of interventions we have really, really good turnouts. So that’s what we’re going to try and do is trying to work on prevention. Prevention is better than cure they say and certainly we’re going to be looking at rolling out different programs when it comes to that.”
According to the Belize Crime Observatory, 1277 Domestic Violence related incidents were reported in 2024.
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