The long-awaited Sexual Harassment Bill will be brought to Parliament in January, Home Affairs Minister Isaac Rankine said Thursday morning
Rankine was at the time responding to a parliamentary question from West Bay Central MP Katherine Ebanks-Wilks, the former minister with responsibility for gender affairs and within whose remit taking the legislation forward fell.
Ebanks-Wilks questioned Rankine on the government’s intentions regarding the draft law.
“It is intention of this government that the Anti-Sexual Harassment Bill be brought to the Parliament in January of 2025,” Rankine said.
It is unclear what the new law states, as the bill is yet to be gazetted.
The initial draft of the legislation was published in February 2023 and underwent two extensive rounds of public consultation.
Former Premier Wayne Panton, who promised to take the law forward and progressed it to the stage of a draft law, told the Compass earlier this year that the revised version was ready to go before Cabinet in November last year.
He had described the ongoing delay in the introduction of legislation to protect victims of sexual harassment “an epic failure“.
During her tenure as minister, Ebanks-Wilks had provided a written response to Newlands MP Panton on 10 Oct. and noted then that the draft Sexual Harassment Bill, 2023, had been considered by caucus in April this year. She said the Gender Affairs Unit “was requested to explore additional options for reporting, investigating and adjudicating sexual harassment cases”.
She said it was expected to be considered by Cabinet before the end of this year.
This law has been long discussed and pursued.
It was first proposed by the Business and Professional Women’s Club in 2005. The group highlighted stalking and sexual harassment as major issues facing women in Cayman, prompting work on the legislation that year.
A version of the bill was published by the Law Reform Commission in 2012, but it was not passed.
While legislation on gender equality and stalking had been enacted in the intervening years, a sexual harassment law remained outstanding.
The Cayman Compass, in a project in 2021, demonstrated that sexual harassment was extremely common and chronically underreported in Cayman.
A total of 90% of respondents in one of the Compass polls in that series said they had been sexually harassed.
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