“Everything in my life is Allah’s work,” says Sakina Bakharia as she sits, sipping on an iced mocha, at a café across from Rockley Beach in Barbados.
Bakharia is buzzing, not only from the coffee but because of a successful 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign her organization, the Barbados Association of Muslim Ladies (BAML), was part of. Running from Nov. 24 to Dec. 10 each year, the initiative raises awareness about domestic and gender-based violence on the island.
Domestic violence is a widespread and urgent issue in the Eastern Caribbean. Prevalent for years, a March 2024 report noted a further 21 percent rise in domestic violence cases in Barbados from the previous year — likely underestimated, given a 30 percent spike in calls to crisis hotlines in the same year.
That is why, at the 2024 launch of Barbados’ 16 Days of Activism — an event that included BAML and other advocates — Tonya Haynes, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, did not mince words. “We live in a world where going to work or walking home from school have proven to be deadly activities for women and girls,” she said.
Her warning was not hyperbolic. She noted that Barbados reports rape rates above the global average and that half of all Barbadian women will experience gender-based violence in their lifetime. “Intimate partner violence, sexual violence, child sexual abuse, and other forms of gender-based violence are daily occurrences in Barbados,” she said, emphasizing that programs like the 16 Days campaign demand we pay attention to those realities.
BAML began in 2010 when Firhaana Bulbulia, now UNICEF’s Eastern Caribbean’s Youth Engagement Officer, created a Facebook group for Muslim girls in Barbados to find safe Islamic spaces to connect and care for one another. In its early years, BAML hosted recreational activities, fundraisers, and community service initiatives, such as food drives for Bajan families. Drawn together by their faith, and united in their sisterhood, BAML’s leaders slowly saw a need to address deeper, often unspoken challenges facing Muslim women in Barbados.
Looking out toward the sea as she finishes her cool coffee, Bakharia says she and her team are there to provide women and girls across Barbados with the resources, tools, and models they need to create a better, safer, and more peaceful reality — drawing on the Sacred to fuel and empower their work.