Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with a senior member of the clergy, a PhD holder who has done significant community work throughout high-crime areas in Trinidad and Tobago.
I brought up the Tight and Pretty video and its implications for the sexualisation of children, and was told that in certain communities, such dancing was not uncommon.
The cleric told me he organised a family football event around 2005, and when he attended it, he was shocked to see a circle of children and adults cheering on a dancer. When the cleric pushed through the crowd to see what was going on, he saw that the dancer was a young prepubescent girl of perhaps 11 or 12 years old, doing highly suggestive dances like a stripper.
This helps us understand why a music video like Tight and Pretty exists. For those who were unaware, there was a lewd music video sung by a teenage girl published online recently, which featured dance moves (thankfully by an older woman) that can only be described as pornographic.
T&T has a wider culture that sexualises children, as represented by lewd dancing in some communities, but all sectors of society have suffered from the failure of adults to protect children in this regard.
Having been involved in advocacy against sexual violence and human trafficking since 2014, I recall that every few years, the mainstream media covers the list of “leaked” photos and videos of women and underage girls that get shared without their consent by porn collectors. The sharing of content of underage girls falls under the prohibition against child pornography in the Children’s Act 2012, making it a criminal offence.
One of the survivors of the illegal sharing of child pornography took the issue to court after the TTPS failed to investigate and prosecute the individuals identified in WhatsApp and Telegram groups who were sharing child pornography. The survivor’s name was anonymised by the court to AB to protect her identity and reputation.
In the Court of Appeal case of AG v AB and the Humanitarian Foundation for Positive Social Change, the issue of child pornography was front and centre of this critical judgment by Justice of Appeal Kokaram.
The facts are harrowing. AB was just 15 when she shared intimate images with her boyfriend. He later disseminated them across pornographic websites and social media groups.
Between August 2020 and August 2022, she repeatedly reported the matter to the police, yet no official investigation was ever launched. One officer lost her evidence; another, she deposed, told her she “might end up dead on the road.” The Cybercrime Unit told her nothing could be done.
Justice Kokaram did not mince words. Child sexual exploitation, he wrote, “dehumanises and debases the helpless victim to satisfy the most banal and guttural of human desires.” A child, he affirmed, “is our society’s most fragile and special resource.”
The court found that AB’s complaint “fell into a black hole,” resurrected only when her advocacy through the Humanitarian Foundation attracted media coverage. As the judgment bluntly states, “The logical inference from the evidence is that the TTPS only took AB seriously as president of the Humanitarian Foundation.” It should not take a press conference to move the police to protect a child.
The human cost was devastating. In her own words, the inaction “affected my ability to sleep and eat, and I was in fear for my personal safety as I was being stalked and harassed online by predators.”
She changed her name by deed poll, deleted her digital life and was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress.
The Court of Appeal held that the State breached AB’s constitutional rights to the protection of the law and to security of the person, the latter recognised as a free-standing right. It awarded her $100,000 in compensatory damages and $20,000 in vindicatory damages. Crucially, the court affirmed that “for the rule of law to be any safeguard… There must be a duty on the State, a duty to protect. Laws have no meaning if they are not enforced.”
That principle should ring loudly. We have the Children’s Act. We have the offences. What we have lacked is the will to enforce them with urgency when a child’s dignity hangs in the balance. As Justice Kokaram concluded, “The system simply failed to do so, and it must face the consequences of this failure.”
As we can see from AB’s case, T&T has a serious problem with child pornography that must be grappled with. The creation of a song titled “Tight and Pretty,” sung by a teenage girl, makes sense in the context of a society that forced AB to file a constitutional motion against the State for failing to address her case.
Likely, the TTPS that refused to investigate the matter were so desensitised to child pornography that they did not see it as a “real” crime. Thankfully, the courts are now forcing the TTPS to think otherwise.
