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‘There is not only a shortage of cells, justice as a whole is struggling with scarcity’ Victim support is not available on St. Maarten. Chief Public Prosecutor Mirjam Mol experiences this as a major lack of law enforcement. As head of the public prosecutor’s office, she has got her hands full prosecuting perpetrators. In addition, due to the shortage of cells, she must decide on the early release of detainees. With the risk of new victims. “These are difficult choices,” says Mol. “The safety of society does not benefit from this.”
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he Chief Public Prosecutor is very concerned about the increasing number of violent crimes. In 2019, the most common offense on St. Maarten, theft, was overtaken by violence. To gain more insight into the background of perpetrators, the St. Maarten Police Force started registering domestic violence last year. Before the domestic violence database was rigged up, the police handled a report of abuse or threat of a family member without taking into account that violence between family members is often systematic in nature. A characteristic of domestic violence is that
the perpetrator and victim (including underage victims) are nevertheless - and sometimes forced permanently part of each other’s living environment. This not only increases the chance of recurrence; domestic violence can be the pressure cooker that leads to people also committing violence outside the family setting. “It’s a taboo,” says Mol. “You don’t talk about what happens in the house. There is fear. And shame. Understandable, but we do have to talk about it.” The right to privacy is a major asset. People prefer not to hang dirty laundry outside.
Mirjam Mol: “Even though it takes place within the privacy of the family, it concerns us all. Domestic violence has an effect on our society. I think there is a relationship between the expressions of violence that we see on the street and the violence that people experience in their own family and the seclusion of their own home. There is an absurd amount of school fights on St. Maarten, the aggressiveness among young people is worrying. We have to talk to our children. Because what is their perspective as they grow up with so much violence around them? Where does all that aggression come
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from? It is an issue that we pay far too little attention to on St. Maarten.” What is the added value of the domestic violence database? “The moment you generate figures; you can create urgency. Certainly because people have a hard time talking about domestic violence or violence against children, you cannot translate into policy without hard figures. If you are going to discuss it at the administrative level, you will soon come up against the question: what are we talking about, how big is the problem anyway? Is it about incidents, or is it a
structural problem? Then you have to stay quiet, because we have never registered it. That feels annoying.” Are there indications that there is more domestic violence in Spanish, English or Frenchspeaking households? “Funny that you ask. In the United States, a large study has been carried out on the assumption that domestic violence mainly occurs in neighborhoods where colored people live and where incomes are low. What turned out to be, lo and behold, domestic violence is much more common in white fami-
