Ryan Ba­choo

A to­tal of 25 Venezue­lan women and 30 lo­cal women, to­geth­er with eight Venezue­lan chil­dren and sev­en lo­cal chil­dren ben­e­fit­ted from self-de­fense train­ing over the last two months.

They gath­ered week­ly to learn self-de­fense tech­niques to build their con­fi­dence, con­scious­ness, and as­sertive­ness as it re­lates to their per­son­al safe­ty.

On Sun­day 3rd April 2023, The In­ter­na­tion­al Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Mi­gra­tion (IOM) cel­e­brat­ed the third it­er­a­tion of the Amethyst Se­cu­ri­ty Train­ing Acad­e­my, (AS­MA), Per­son­al and Com­mu­ni­ty Safe­ty Project- StrongHer, Safe­Her, To­getH­er at a grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny for par­tic­i­pants at the Ari­ma West Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School.

It was fund­ed by the De­part­ment of State's Bu­reau of Pop­u­la­tion, Refugees, and Mi­gra­tion.

The project pro­pos­al was guid­ed by a num­ber of fac­tors in­clud­ing the rise of gen­der-based vi­o­lence in Trinidad and To­ba­go as well as the re­sults of the IOM’s 2022 Dis­place­ment Track­ing Ma­trix (DTM) which re­vealed that Gen­der Based Vi­o­lence (GBV), and xeno­pho­bia were key chal­lenges faced by mi­grants.

Jew­el Ali, Head of Of­fice for IOM Port of Spain, said, “Be­cause of this com­pelling ev­i­dence, IOM Port of Spain iden­ti­fied the need to em­pow­er women and trans­form the so­cial struc­tures and re­la­tion­ships that make vi­o­lence against them pos­si­ble. Fur­ther, to fos­ter in­te­gra­tion among Venezue­lan mi­grants and host com­mu­ni­ties, and in this case fe­male Venezue­lans, to en­able their ef­fec­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion and lead­er­ship in peace­ful co­ex­is­tence and ad­vo­ca­cy ef­forts, the pro­mo­tion of sports and cul­tur­al ac­tiv­i­ties to re­in­force so­cial in­te­gra­tion, the de­vel­op­ment of lead­er­ship skills for women, it was felt that this em­pow­er­ment-based self-de­fense train­ing was fit­ting.”

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment and Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Ari­ma, Pen­ne­lope Beck­les-Robin­son, said, "What stood out to me was the in­te­gra­tion of cul­tures through lan­guage, where I saw every­one learn­ing a phrase or two in Span­ish dur­ing the ses­sion.

I was fur­ther touched and elat­ed that the pro­gram fea­tured hear­ing im­paired par­tic­i­pants, en­sur­ing that they were in­clud­ed in learn­ing to de­fend them­selves."