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Tuesday, 30 December 2008 16:52 |
 In order to respond many problems concerning legal issues and injustice that were faced by women headed household, since 2005 the National Secretariat had made cooperation with World Bank’s Justice for the Poor team in organizing activities of legal empowerment. These activities also received special fund from Justice for the Poor. In the early stage, the focus was put on arousing awareness of legal rights and building capacity to access justice through legal process. The activities were legal awareness training, paralegal development and legal advocacy. Until the end of 2008 trainings on legal empowerment for cadres of women headed household groups had been held for 22 times, involving 726 participants. The trainings had resulted in legal cadres with quality almost close to professional paralegals. Following the legal cadre training with assistance from field facilitators, discussions and courses on legal aspects were carried out for the women and other members of communities. There were 11 legal courses that had been carried out until the end of 2008, involving 289 participants, while discussions had intensively been done for 173 times with total number of participants reaching 4,840 people.
One more important action in the frame of legal empowerment is the establishment of Stakeholder Forums (FPK), each of which is a forum of representatives from diverse law enforcing institutions in an area. Through this forum, women headed household can build communication and partnership so that when facing legal problems every group has already known the corresponding institutions that they consider able to assist them to get justice they pursue.
In this period three stakeholder forums that were quite active and effective were made. The three forums had done workshops for 8 times with 231 participants and coordination meetings for 11 times with 148 participants. The existence of such forum was one of factors for the success of all legal advocacy activities done by women headed household groups.
In daily activities legal cadres of women headed household groups also got involved in handling various violence cases that were experienced by not only women headed household but also other members of communities. Until the end of 2008, the National Secretariat recorded there were 65 cases having been handled by legal cadres of women headed household groups. The cases mostly were domestic violence (24 cases), divorce appeal (22 cases) and sexual violence (11 cases). There were 3 cases related to migrant laborers and 2 cases to dispute on inheritance. One case respectively was related to violence in dating, gender violence and dispute on marital property. |
