Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

Min­is­ter with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Gen­der and Child Af­fairs Ayan­na Web­ster-Roy says adults need to fig­ure out what is the root cause of the vi­o­lence in schools.

Her com­ment comes in the wake of a class­room fight at the Sig­nal Hill Sec­ondary in To­ba­go last Fri­day, which was record­ed and sub­se­quent­ly went vi­ral on so­cial me­dia.

The two minute and 40-sec­ond video shows a class­room of stu­dents ver­bal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly as­sault­ing a class­mate.

The Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search and Tech­nol­o­gy yes­ter­day con­firmed that some of the stu­dents in­volved in the at­tack have been sus­pend­ed.

Speak­ing at the launch of the U Re­port Youth Fo­rum at the Teach­ing and Learn­ing Com­plex at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies in St Au­gus­tine, Web­ster-Roy said she saw the video on Face­book but when she read some of the com­ments, no one could find the main rea­son for the stu­dents’ re­ac­tion.

“There must be some­thing deeply root­ed with­in our schools and com­mu­ni­ties at this time af­fect­ing our chil­dren and the on­ly way they know to re­act is by lash­ing out,” Web­ster-Roy said.

She said she be­lieved the plat­form can help the stu­dents ex­press them­selves but al­so help the adults to learn and un­der­stand the youths.

“We have to un­der­stand you to be able to help you, to be able to change our school en­vi­ron­ment, to be able to change our com­mu­ni­ties, our con­stituen­cies, Trinidad and To­ba­go be­longs to all of us and we all have a du­ty and a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to en­sure that we cre­ate the best pos­si­ble en­vi­ron­ment for all chil­dren and fu­ture gen­er­a­tions,” she said.

Say­ing “chil­dren are mes­sages we send in­to the fu­ture,”

Web­ster-Roy asked of pol­i­cy mak­ers and cit­i­zens, what mes­sage they were send­ing in­to fu­ture T&T when there are chil­dren hurt­ing while some peo­ple lack the will and the com­pas­sion to in­ter­vene.

“What mes­sage are we send­ing to young per­sons, when some per­sons, when they are called out, like I was called out, just put it aside and move on,” she said.

She said young peo­ple want their voice to be heard but some refuse to recog­nise the pow­er of the youth voice.

Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary of the Min­istry of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice Nar­ine Char­ran said the free, anony­mous, non-ex­clu­sive so­cial mes­sag­ing plat­form for young peo­ple (ages 13-29) can help them ex­press them­selves while al­so help adults un­der­stand their is­sues.

He said in ad­di­tion to util­is­ing the U Re­port tool to con­front cy­ber­bul­ly­ing, mi­gra­tion, HIV/AIDS and dis­cuss the im­pli­ca­tions of the Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals (SDGs), it will al­so be used for men­tal health and men­tal health live chats and to pro­vide mi­grants with le­gal ad­vice on doc­u­men­ta­tions. Char­ran said there are al­so peer-to-peer coun­selling ser­vices.