Campaign to empower young people to fight gender-based violence

It’s about time young people, especially young women, are taught how to deal with potentially harmful situations that may occur in real life.

This is what the Caribbean Gender Alliance (CGA) hopes to do with its new campaign facilitated by the children’s NGO create.future.good. The campaign is just one aspect of the CGA’s activities for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.

The 16 Days of Activism runs from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25 to Human Rights Day on December 10.

Also, in 2008, the United Nations Secretary-General launched the campaign UNITE by 2030 to End Violence against Women, which runs parallel to the 16 Days of Activism. This year’s theme is UNITE! Invest to prevent violence against women and girls.

Alysha Baptiste, 19, who headed the pilot project at Bishop Anstey High School, said she got involved with the campaign because she could no longer just sit back and do nothing about the violence perpetrated against women and girls in Trinidad and Tobago.

“I got behind it because it's not a conversation that we get to have as young ladies. As a 19-year-old I think it's unfortunate that I would open my Instagram and every day there are girls around my age, who look like me, who grew up like me, who go missing, or are abused or raped.

“Then you hear stories about women in abusive relationships for years and they don't feel as though they have the power to get out of it.

“Just seeing that every day, seeing the uproar people make every time it happens, and then we get quiet, and then it happens again, and then uproar again. For me, it is frustrating to be in that cycle. And I feel like we need to do more than just blow up on an Instagram page every time it happens. We need to actually do something more.”

The campaign started in mid-October with a “womentorship” workshop for the Form Six students of Bishop Anstey, of which she is an alumnus. The girls learned about advocacy and advocacy techniques, the different issues they could champion, and came up with their own topics such as peer pressure abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, engagements of drugs and alcohol, bad friendships and bad relationships.

They presented the theme to the school population in an assembly via a skit showing a modern-day example of what young women around the would go through. They chose to present a group of female friends sneaking out to go to a party and a man slipping a drug into one of the girls’ drinks.

“Even though it was a heavy topic, the way the girls chose to present it left everyone engaged. And even though parts were comical, they did a survey and the students understood the severity of the situations they could find themselves in.”

The girls also came up with different ways to educate the school population on how to say “no” when they felt pressured to partake in certain activities or behaviours. She said the list could give them the power to avoid doing things they do not wish to and protect themselves from potentially harmful situations.

The students also painted placards displaying various messages such as “Awareness = Change” and “Choose inspirational friendships,” which will be displayed throughout the school in the upcoming term.

Baptiste said the teachers and staff of the school thought it was a “lovely presentation” and agreed it was something they should talk to the girls about more. The students were excited to address the topic and, in the end, felt more equipped to handle similar situations.

“The girls in the womentorship workshop definitely welcomed the conversation because many of them realised, ‘Oh, I have been a victim. Maybe not in the worst of ways but in some way, I have fallen victim to violence or abuse.’

“From there, I think the girls really felt empowered once they started to work on creating the messages and getting behind it. And so for them, they were just really glad to advocate for something so important.”

She said the CGA hoped to expand the campaign to other schools because thousands of students leave school and “go out into the world” every year.

“The more that we can educate, is the more children that can go out into the world and maybe feeling a bit safer, maybe feeling a bit more empowered, maybe recognising a bad situation and getting themselves out before it becomes something that reaches a newspaper headline.

“The more we educate the girls, the more they will have the power to do better by themselves. And the more that we educate the boys, the more they can help in standing up for the young ladies. So we definitely intend to expand the project and we hope it can even have a regional reach in time to come.”

She explained some recent secondary school graduates were working with create.future.good and the CGA, doing research on the women’s movement in the Caribbean when Beverly Griffith, dean of Bishop Anstey’s Sixth Form encouraged them to do a project at the school.

As someone who wanted to see change in TT and who recognised she could not do it alone, Baptiste decided she would get involved in any project that could help improve her society.

“I’m 19 and should I live on this planet for 40 more years I want to know I’m living in a world that’s safe, not just for me but everyone around me.”

Nadella Oya, chair of the CGA, and founder and director of create.future.good said when Baptiste and her five female colleagues began interning at CGA after their graduations, she realised none of them were prepared for the transition from student to adulthood.

“It’s a huge learning opportunity but it also can create very vulnerable situations for young people. And that is why advantage needs to be taken while they're in school, to prep them, both boys and girls, for the real world.”

As a result, the campaign highlighted how girls could be protected around issues they may face every day, such as being marked or being verbally or physically attacked because of the way they dress, and peer pressure to drink, smoke or have sex.

She said the solution the girls came up with was education, to proactively discuss such issues with both boys and girls, and she expressed pride in the way they were taking matters into their own hands.

“They are creatively coming up with ways to furnish themselves and their peers with information to protect themselves to navigate adolescent-hood and early adulthood in safe ways when it came to their mental, physical, sexual and relationship health.

“Furnishing themselves with information that is already available proactively helps end violence against women and girls.”

Oya added that the UN Population Fund in TT, create.future.good and the Network of NGOs have been engaging faith-based organisations to help develop teaching material to help support the delivery of the primary health and family life education curriculum. This too would furnish students with information to help them thrive.

The six girls also did research on some of the women involved in the Caribbean women’s movement which made them realise they too had the ability to do the same type of activism.

She said if girls in the Caribbean knew about the “powerful, amazing, brilliant, courageous” women of the women’s movement, they would understand on whose shoulders they stood and where they fell in that system.

Their research resulted in a collection of stories which will be launched on the CGA social media pages for Human Rights Day.

Oya also stressed the importance of bringing both girls and boys into the women’s movement, noting that the CGA was supported by UN Women, the civil society movement and many male allies of all ages throughout the region.

To view and participate in the campaign, visit caribbeangender on Instagram and Facebook.