KINGSTON, Jamaica – Jamaica’s press has dominated the 2005 edition of the UNFPA Caribbean Media Awards on “Gender Equality, Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals” held at the Hilton Kingston on Tuesday, December 6, 2005.
During the awards presentation, Jamaican reporters copped four of the six awards presented in radio, print and television categories, while their colleagues from Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago secured the remaining honours.
RADIO
Jamaica dominated the radio category of the competition with Damion Mitchell of POWER 106 FM winning the top Platinum category for an entry titled “Murderous Rage,” the harrowing story of a woman and her three children who were savaged and mutilated by the man who should have been their protector; while IRIE FM’s Sonja Simms took the runner-up Gold prize for her feature on “Prostitution in Jamaica.”
In the print category, Eulalee Thompson of the Jamaica Gleaner scored Platinum for “It’s your health, take control” / “Sex, Gender and HIV/AIDS,” representing coverage for August and September that was part of the paper’s year-long health campaign, while Cedriann Martin of the Trinidad Express copped Gold for Teen Sex, a five part series on adolescent sexual reproductive health and rights.
TELEVISION
In the television category, Sharda Ganga of Stichting Projekta, a Surinamese NGO working in the field of sustainable human development won the Platinum prize for her production “Wan Lobi Tori, A Love Story” which uses a Romeo and Juliet style love story to tackle issues of stigma and discrimination, and living with HIV; while Carol Francis of Television Jamaica copped Gold for producing a series focusing on HIV/AIDS in women and teenagers which got people to see the person first, not the disease.
The Caribbean may be a region with strong taboos and prejudices, but the entries to this competition showed that there is a strong and irrepressible corps of journalists prepared to combat those prejudices with vigour and professional exactitude.
Each of the winners, and indeed those who did not quite make it this time, went out of their way to examine aspects of Caribbean society which many people are all too comfortable ignoring: how traditional views of gender status and roles can reinforce poverty and lack of education to bring about a cycle of economically enforced prostitution on the streets and physical abuse, violence, and even murder, in the home.
“UNFPA intends to continue to offer support to our media partners in the important role that they are playing in highlighting and helping our people to understand their sexual and reproductive health and rights, including those relating to gender equality,” said Harold Robinson, the Kingston-based United Nations Population Fund representative for the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, who thanked all the journalists who entered this year’s competition and invited all who did not do so to get ready for next year’s awards.
