Bearing witness to sexual violence against girls

APRIL IS National Child Abuse Prevention Month in Trinidad and Tobago.

Child abuse takes many forms and includes physical, emotional, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as neglect of children. Public education campaigns over the last 15 years have led to increased awareness and willingness to report by children as well as by family members, neighbours and teachers. This is extremely valuable and, as we saw in the last few weeks from mobile phone recordings of child abuse, could save children who would otherwise suffer without escape.

In my conversations with secondary school students, many recognise the Blue Teddy symbol of the IGDS, UWI’s Break the Silence: End Child Sexual Abuse campaign. Such recognition signals real transformation from a generation that hid sexual abuse and denied its prevalence to one that sees it being openly and publicly discussed, highlighting how common it is and how important it is for children to speak out.

The Children’s Authority, the Office of the Prime Minister (Gender and Child Affairs), National Family Services, and a vast range of NGOs, such as createfuturegood, have led an immense amount of sensitisation so that we are beginning to understand that many families are not safe spaces for children, that substance abuse and poor mental health trigger abuse, and that financial and psychosocial support can help to reduce physical abuse and neglect.

Most of the videos that circulate of mothers abusing children are of poor families facing intersecting vulnerabilities, including intergenerational trauma, early motherhood, insufficient income and financial dependence, unequally shared responsibility for care, and inadequate social services.

Beyond child abuse by those known to and trusted by children, however, is another kind of vulnerability that we are not close to tackling and have no strategy for ending. This is sexual violence perpetrated by strangers against children, most of whom are girls.

For the past month, I’ve been unable to forget the story of the 11-year-old girl allegedly abducted by four men from her home in central Trinidad on March 8, International Women’s Day. As reported by the Express on March 11, a piece of cloth placed over her nose and mouth made her unconscious and she awoke to find herself blindfolded and chained to a bed. She is 11. Men held her down while others raped her. After, one of the men “used a key to unlock four locks from the chains that were used to bind the girl’s hands and feet” and told her to run. She is 11, and her life will never be the same.

When a story about abuse of children happens, men’s groups are quick to blame mothers. When sexual crimes by men happen, and girls and women cannot be blamed, men’s groups are silent when they should be actively strengthening national campaigns to stop complicity with male predation, which seems to occur not just by individuals, but by groups of men.

More than a decade ago, as reported by the Guardian, a ten-year-old girl was abducted outside a DVD store with her brothers in June 2012. Men released her brothers but took her somewhere secluded and took turns raping her.

Later in May, the Guardian reported that a teenager was dragged into a heavily tinted black car while she stood on the road in Princes Town. She was released after being raped at an abandoned house by more than one man.

In January 2013, a 13-year-old schoolgirl was abducted by three men in Oropouche. She entered a taxi in San Fernando, but the driver passed her stop and two men entered the car. They threatened to kill her. As reported by the Guardian, “she could not say how many men had raped her or even where she was taken because her abductors had put a bag over her head.”

We feel unsafe unless girl children are in our sight. We believe they could be abducted from the driveway or backyard. We send boys rather than girls to the parlour. We are desperately aware that men, as individuals and in groups, are a threat as girls grow into women. Girls learn this fear, as they must. Talk to teens. They are terrified and have every right to be.

What does it mean to bear witness to violence against children, to child sexual abuse, and to the particular vulnerability of girls? It means seeing these not as isolated events, but as the repeated, unending and ever-present effects of continuing conditions of gendered injustice, violence and inequality.

For children, there must be collective responsibility.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 529

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