Ayaan is twelve years old, and he’s afraid to sleep at night. On nights when he actually falls asleep for more than a couple of hours, he wets the bed. For the past five years, he has been exposed to continuous cursing, fighting and a generally tense home environment. His father accused his mother of being unfaithful, and every day when she comes home from work, they fight. Ayaan is scared of his father, and he is afraid for his mother. Sometimes he gets slapped and kicked, although he hides under a table when the fighting starts.
In another home, there is Christian. He is a 16-year-old, form six student in a prestigious secondary school. Every Friday evening, his father would come home drunk and beat his mother. Christian would try to protect his mother as much as possible. He begged her to leave, but every time she did, the father would plead with her to come back, and it became a pattern of abuse and reconciliation. One day, when he could not take it anymore, he stood up to his father, beating him until he couldn’t move. Both parents threw him out of the house, and now he lives with relatives, labelled as a “problem child”.
It is that time of the year when we focus on gender-based violence again. The UN’s 16 Days of Activism started on November 25th, two days after Romona Victor was murdered by her husband. Every year around this time, we would hear how women need to get out of abusive relationships, or how they need to choose their men wisely and have more respect for themselves. Instead of focusing on the men who are abusive and who kill their girlfriends and wives, we judge the victims, questioning why they stayed when “they should have walked away”. Sadly, every year it is the same narrative.
But what about the children? What happens to Ayaan? To Christian? To the hundreds of children who grow up in homes where shouting replaces love, where fear replaces safety and where conflict and violence are normalised? One of the most troubling aspects of gender-based violence in T&T is that we do not even know the full scale of its impact on our children. There is no thorough and consistent national structure that tracks how many children are living in homes affected by abuse or how many witness violence. Consequently, we do not know how their experiences impact their mental health and development.
Children like Ayaan and Christian remain statistically invisible at a national level. Data is lacking because of under-reporting, social stigma, fear of retaliation and the shame that still surrounds domestic violence. There are many families in T&T who suffer in silence, who do not report cases of abuse and violence to the T&T Police Service or social services. At an institutional level, funding challenges, poor data collection structures and disinterest mean that children’s exposure to domestic violence has not yet been measured in any systematic way. This has resulted in the lack of any proactive attempt to assist children who are both witnesses and victims of gender-based violence. When we do not know the number of children suffering in these situations, it becomes easier to ignore them, and their trauma continues without any serious intervention at a national level.
International research has shown that children like Ayaan and Christian are far more likely to suffer from anxiety, sleep disorders, depression, poor academic performance and long-term trauma. The NGO, CRY America, notes that when gender-based violence occurs, “children are never just bystanders. Whether they face it directly or witness it happening to someone close, the impact runs deep.” Children find it hard to manage their emotions, the stress at home affects their school life, and violence becomes normal for them. Some children become withdrawn and scared, while others become angry and volatile. Christian’s story also shows where children are forced to become protectors and mediators. When it becomes too much, and they explode, they are labelled as uncontrollable, delinquent, and violent.
As Desmond Tutu once said, “There comes a point where we must stop just pulling people out of the river. We have to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” Thus, for T&T to really make a breakthrough in decreasing gender-based violence, we have to address the roots of this violence. What is causing it? Is it poverty, substance abuse or generational trauma? Is it a result of toxic masculinity or societal “norms” such as infidelity? We know that we need to raise boys to respect girls/women, but how are we doing that? At what point will we make conflict management and emotional intelligence part of the school curriculum? Truly committing to ending gender-based violence requires us to move beyond surface solutions and confront the systems, attitudes and silence that allow violence to thrive. Unless we protect the children watching in fear, we will continue to fail generations yet unborn.
