The Promoting Empowerment through Awareness for Lesbian and Bi-Sexual Women's group, PETAL hosted its 3rd annual women’s forum today â€" quite fitting since it’s international women’s day. The forum title was "Our Bodies Our Selves: Examining the Age of Consent Dilemma in Belize". We spoke to one of the founding members of PETAL about today’s discussion.
Charrice Talbert - PETAL
"This is the 3rd year we are having the women’s forum and every year we try to look at a national issue, we do know the age of consent is of concern, an issue nationally, the reason we focused on that this year is because there is a lot surrounding sexual violence, domestic violence, anything that concerns women and children it is always not being highlighted and so we wanted for this year to look at that the age of consent, the dilemma but we didn’t just want to look at it in that aspect, we are in no way challenging the age of consent but we just want it to be known that as much as the age of consent being 16, okay fine, it is 16 but know that other things need to be afforded to youth as well meaning that if I am having sex I should be able to access the type of health care that goes along with that so there is a responsibility there."
"So for this year having the panel discussion it focused on 3 areas our bodies which was looking at it from a body positivity aspect and then the whole health and wellness of that, we also looked at ourselves, cultural norms, thing people think they know but don’t know and so we had the panelist which were from the Mestizo, Maya and Garifuna and Creole ethnicity, so they could clear up what people wanted to know because we do know there is a lot of misconception when it comes to ethnic norms and there is the also a legal panel because we couldn’t just do what we think we had to include the legal panel as well. Every year March is celebrated as Women’s month as the 8th of March is celebrated as international women’s day as I say women do a lot, continue to do a lot as much as they continue to do a lot, a lot gets done to them that does not get addressed so what I want people to walk away from here with is that we need to do more, we deserve more so more needs to be done."
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