Progress continues, steadily and surely, on issues relating to sexual and reproductive rights, gender equality (my thoughts from 2020 here) and gender-based violence in the Caribbean (in addition to LGBT rights, to a much more limited extent perhaps). It may seem rather patchy, here and there, but sometimes small battles, as well as the large ones, need to be fought and won, one at a time. In Jamaica, while 28 percent of Jamaican women experience physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to the Final Report of the Women’s Health Surveyof 2016… most do not seek help and suffer in silence.

The United Nations’ Spotlight Initiative, which describes itself as “the world’s largest targeted effort to end all forms of violence against women and girls,” with substantial support from the European Union, has given a major boost to the struggle to…