Weto in Mour — Marshall Islands Gender-Based Violence Support Service

Weto in Mour ("A Place of Life") is the Marshall Islands' first dedicated counselling and support service for women and girl survivors of gender-based violence, established and operated by Women United Together Marshall Islands (WUTMI), the country's principal national women's organisation, founded in 1987 with membership spanning 22 of the Marshall Islands' 24 outer islands. The Majuro centre officially opened on 21 September 2016, funded by the Australian government's Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development programme, and was staffed by five people: a programme manager, two caseworkers and two prevention/community education workers.

The service provides direct casework — counselling, safety planning, and in some cases financial support such as travel or school-fee assistance for survivors without family support — alongside community prevention work that engages churches and atoll leaders to shift norms discouraging women from reporting abuse. In 2021 the model was replicated in Ebeye, Kwajalein Atoll, the country's second-most-populous urban centre, funded by the EU–UN Spotlight Initiative delivered via UN Women, with support from the Kwajalein Atoll Local Government and training partners WHO, UNFPA and IOM.

In 2022, under the same Spotlight Initiative platform, WUTMI extended training to the Marshall Islands Police Department: 15 officers covering the outer islands of Jaluit, Mejit, Wotje and Majuro were trained in gender-sensitive, survivor-centred response — a shift from a service-only model toward institutional, justice-sector engagement. A separate WUTMI awareness session reached 85 young women and men on ending violence, and multiple sources report that roughly one in three Marshallese women experience some form of abuse in their lifetime, underscoring the scale of unmet need the service was designed to address.

As of 2017, WUTMI's own programme manager described intake of "two or three women coming to us" a month as "just a drop in the bucket" against actual abuse levels, an acknowledgement of strong cultural pressure to preserve family harmony that discourages reporting. No independent evaluation of the programme's impact on violence outcomes was found, and no source confirms client numbers, budget, or operational status for the Ebeye centre or police-training initiative beyond 2022.

Read the full analysis: https://marshallislandsjournal.com/weto-mour-helps-women/