For the second time this year, Wayne Panton has asked government through parliamentary questions for an update on the Sexual Harassment Bill he piloted when he was premier.
Again, the answer was it is still being reviewed, and is expected to be considered by Cabinet before the end of this year.
The minister with responsibility for gender affairs, Katherine Ebanks-Wilks, provided a written response to Newlands MP Panton on 10 Oct., which noted that the draft Sexual Harassment Bill, 2023, had been considered by caucus in April this year, when the Gender Affairs Unit “was requested to explore additional options for reporting, investigating and adjudicating sexual harassment cases”.
She added, “This exploration process has been ongoing through consultations with relevant Government agencies, in order to determine feasible options. As soon as the Ministry has received all of the necessary and important feedback from the consultations, and completed the requested tasks, the Bill will be returned to Cabinet for consideration before year end.”
The response was similar to that given to Panton when he raised the matter of the long-delayed bill in Parliament in July, although the latest version gives a timeline of when Cabinet will consider the newest draft of the bill.
The initial draft was published in February 2023, and was subject to two extensive rounds of public consultation.
Panton had previously told the Compass that the revised version was ready to go before Cabinet in November last year, and described the ongoing delay in the introduction of legislation to protect victims of sexual harassment “an epic fail“.
Such legislation was first proposed by the Business and Professional Women’s Club in 2005 after the group highlighted stalking and sexual harassment as major issues facing women in Cayman. Work on the legislation began that year and a version of the bill was published by the Law Reform Commission in 2012, but was not passed.
Legislation on gender equality and on stalking has been enacted in the intervening years, but not a sexual harassment law.
The issue was highlighted by the Cayman Compass in 2021 in a project which demonstrated that sexual harassment is extremely common and chronically underreported in Cayman. In one of the Compass polls in that series, 90% of respondents said they had been sexually harassed.
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