The killing of our teens

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

SUNDAY’S headlines that describe the death of a pregnant teen during police execution of a warrant reinforce a vulnerability I’ve been mulling over since a 16-year-old girl was shot in the stomach and her boyfriend, Daniel Riley, was killed in April 2023. Since then, I’ve been particularly interested in how teenage girls are being drawn into gun violence, shootings, reprisals and gang warfare.

Teenagers are being killed by assassinations or in exchanges of gunfire which happen when they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or with or near targeted people – usually adult men.

Among youth, these deaths are mainly happening to teenage boys, which signals a specific risk of being killed that starts for men when they are minors. Masculinity and gun violence fuel greater lethal risk in boys’ lives.

Think of Anim Persad, 15, and Olumn James, 18, who were killed in November 2023 while at a parlour, and in the path of a spray of bullets. Think of Roshan Adam Ali, 16, who was killed while two other teenage boys, one 18 and one 13, were shot. Think of Andre Singh, 16, shot along with two others. Think of Denelson Smith and Mark Richards, killed in their school uniform. Gangs and guns are therefore also issues of child protection.

It’s important to nonetheless note the specific sexual vulnerability of girls. Their risk is feminised and fundamentally different from that of boys as teens.

This is why if you scour headlines, the phrase “pregnant teen” comes up in stories of teenage girls being killed. I’m thinking of Shantel Byer, 16, of Tunapuna. How can we forget Danielle Yearwood, 19, of Valencia?

About one in ten births is by a teenager in TT. Mainly, these are young women from working class families, and the fathers of their children are older and/or low-income men. This is a fairly steady ratio that has not significantly decreased.

When the Government refuses to teach about sex (whether in terms of sexual abuse and forced sex or the need for contraception when sex is consensual), it is adolescent girls who pay the price. When it doesn’t provide sexual health information to teens as a standard part of adolescent healthcare, this too is a policy failure with costs to girls.

There’s a religious lobby pressuring the Government to not teach comprehensive sexuality education. There is little care for how it might help these teens. Ever vote-conscious, the Government has backed away from leadership when it is most needed. Thus, the rate of teenage births being about nine per cent of all births is not about to significantly decrease.

As communities become more unsafe, and men take greater risks to make money, this is an issue to which we should pay attention. At the intersections of men in gangs, with guns and trading drugs, are unions with low-income teenage girls.

As crime increases, so too will risks to these adolescents. Think of Ameena Thomas, 17, who had been married to 33-year-old Carlile Hamilton before she was killed. He had also been shot but survived.

There’s been some attention to this in Caribbean scholarship, but not enough. A 2007 qualitative study in two urban communities found that adolescent girls in insecure socio-economic contexts find safety and security in having a “badman” as a partner. Badmen have status, money and power, are armed, and can protect young women; sending a message to other women and men that she should be treated with respect as his queen.

Men in these relationships target and control teenage girls by "breeding them," which locks them into a relationship of dependence, even if the men (eventually or simultaneously) have other women partners. Pregnancy is also a marker of adult womanhood. As the study described it, through their relationships with badmen, girls get maximum respect. In reality, they have minimal control.

Girls can pursue their own educational or occupational opportunities. However, if these are not within sight, they can end up in relationships which they think (or which appear to promise) financial support.

Data on adolescent girls who experience early and unplanned pregnancy also emphasise that they often have histories of family violence, sexual abuse, forced sex, and insufficiently-met economic and emotional needs.

By the time they end up in headlines, there’s been a journey where interventions are non-existent, inadequate or irrelevant.

All this to say, I think we need a careful and gendered analysis of how our country is killing teens.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 526

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