Trinidad and Tobago’s Legal Response to Domestic Violence: Incomplete and Inadequate Without a Focus on Achieving Substantive Equality

Domestic Violence, which disproportionately affects women, is a manifestation of patriarchal gender stereotypes and gender-based power imbalances. Trinidad and Tobago’s legal response to domestic violence focuses on providing remedies and punishment for sufferers and perpetrators of abuse, respectively. While remedies and punishment are necessary aspects of a proper state response to domestic violence, without an underlying aspiration of dismantling gender inequality, the country’s legal response only superficially addresses the wound of domestic violence and omits treating the deep cultural disease of historically unequal gender power relations, which causes the wound. This chapter offers substantive equality as an approach to correcting the institutionalized gender inequality which is permissive of domestic violence, thereby more effectively confronting the social ill. It presents four necessary elements of a substantive equality approach to domestic violence, which aligns with international treaty obligations and lays the groundwork for more strategic, meaningful state responses to domestic violence.