Why are so many women from St. Vincent and the Grenadines seeking Canadian asylum?

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Source: Toronto Star

By Jennifer Yang Staff Reporter

Every now and then you have to cuff them down/ They love you long and they love you strong/ Black up they eye, bruise up they knee/ Then they will love you eternally

lyrics from a classic Calypso song

Hungary, China, Namibia, Colombia, Mexico. These are among the top 10 countries from which refugee claims to Canada are made.

But one of the world’s tiniest nations has started appearing on the list, a place many Canadians couldn’t find on a map: St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Last year, 710 Vincentians sought asylum in Canada, up from only 179 in 2001.

Over the past decade, it adds up to more than 4,500 refugee claimants — or 4.3 per cent of the tiny Caribbean archipelago’s population. Proportionally, it’s as if the entire populations of Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador were to flee Canada.

Last year, this “jewel of the Caribbean” ranked 8th in the world for refugee claims to Canada, surpassing India (population 1.2 billion) and Pakistan (population 187 million).

The population of St. Vincent and the Grenadines? An estimated 104,000.

The majority of Vincentians flocking to Canada are women. And it appears most are fleeing domestic violence.

“There is something very wrong in the relationship between men and women in St. Vincent and the Grenadines,” wrote Canadian Federal Court Justice Sean Harrington in a 2009 ruling. “Year after year, woman after woman washes up on our shores seeking protection from abusive, violent husbands or boyfriends.”

It turns out the vacationer’s idyll, with its turquoise waters and verdant hills, is one of the world’s worst places to be a woman.

Over the last decade, more women have been murdered in St. Vincent than any other country in the nine-member Organization of Eastern Caribbean States.

In 2007, the island nation had the third-highest rate of reported rapes in the world, according to a UN report. Even Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has been twice accused of sexual assault, once by a policewoman and once by a Toronto lawyer. Both charges have since been withdrawn by the public prosecutor.

And then there’s domestic violence.

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