Ordinary special victims

ACTING Superintendent Claire Guy-Alleyne, the head of the police’s Gender-Based Violence Unit (GBVU), wants victims of crime to stand their ground if they are given the cold shoulder or turned away when making a report at a police station.

“We are mandated to take every single report,” Supt Guy-Alleyne said on Thursday at a police briefing. “Do not leave the station. You can ask for the most senior person on duty and get some redress. We must take your report.”

The GBVU now falls under a department known as the “Special Victims Unit,” which also includes the Child Protection Unit. But the advice issued by Supt Guy-Alleyne does not show any special empathy or understanding of the difficult position victims find themselves in.

It’s silly to suggest someone who has just been traumatised or violated must, after summoning the courage to report the matter, then also be made to do battle with the officer at the front desk.

Supt Guy-Alleyne – who once advised women not to smile at harassers in the street – may well wish to encourage victims to view themselves as active, not passive, participants in the justice system. But her advice comes perilously close to blaming the victim for not being strong enough or not demanding enough when facing officers.

The consensus has long been that offences such as domestic abuse remain grossly underreported in this country. Over 100,000 women in TT are estimated to have experienced one or more acts of physical or sexual violence, according to the 2018 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) National Women’s Health Survey. Generally, sexual offences are underreported by as much as 82 per cent, according to the National Crime and Victimisation Survey 2015.

Supt Guy-Alleyne noted that since the launch of the unit last year, the GBVU has interacted with 2,622 victims, with all saying they were “happy” with the “service” they were provided. Her boss, Commissioner of Police Gary Griffith, said the police approval rating for its work on gender-based violence was 84 per cent.

These figures mean little if the vast majority of cases and victims never make it to a police station. It needs to be asked why.

The main barrier to reporting domestic violence is embarrassment or shame, according to a paper by academics at the University of the West Indies, published in 2019 in the Justice Policy Journal. Other considerations include: protection of family, economic status and being negatively viewed by the public. That includes the police.

Both Supt Guy-Alleyne and CoP Griffith boasted on Thursday about the wealth of sensitive, specially-trained investigators now deployed throughout the service.

But if the officer on duty in a station has no basic empathy for a victim before him, what use are all the investigators’ skillsets? The onus must be on the police, not the victim, to do the right thing and in the right way.