It’s about time young people, especially young women, are taught how to deal with potentially harmful situations that may occur in real life.
This is what the Caribbean Gender Alliance (CGA) hopes to do with its new campaign facilitated by the children’s NGO create.future.good. The campaign is just one aspect of the CGA’s activities for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.
The 16 Days of Activism runs from the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25 to Human Rights Day on December 10.
Also, in 2008, the United Nations Secretary-General launched the campaign UNITE by 2030 to End Violence against Women, which runs parallel to the 16 Days of Activism. This year’s theme is UNITE! Invest to prevent violence against women and girls.
Alysha Baptiste, 19, who headed the pilot project at Bishop Anstey High School, said she got involved with the campaign because she could no longer just sit back and do nothing about the violence perpetrated against women and girls in Trinidad and Tobago.
“I got behind it because it's not a conversation that we get to have as young ladies. As a 19-year-old I think it's unfortunate that I would open my Instagram and every day there are girls around my age, who look like me, who grew up like me, who go missing, or are abused or raped.
“Then you hear stories about women in abusive relationships for years and they don't feel as though they have the power to get out of it.
“Just seeing that every day, seeing the uproar people make every time it happens, and then we get quiet, and then it happens again, and then uproar again. For me, it is frustrating to be in that cycle. And I feel like we need to do more than just blow up on an Instagram page every time it happens. We need to actually do something more.”
The campaign started in mid-October with a “womentorship” workshop for the Form Six students of Bishop Anstey, of which she is an alumnus. The girls learned about advocacy and advocacy techniques, the different issues they could champion, and came up with their own topics such as peer pressure abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, engagements of drugs and alcohol, bad friendships and bad relationships.
They presented the theme to the school population in an assembly via a skit showing a modern-day example of what young women around the would go through. They chose to present a group of female friends sneaking out to go to a party and a man slipping a drug into one of the girls’ drinks.
“Even though it was a heavy topic, the way the girls chose to present it left everyone engaged. And even though parts were comical, they did a survey and the students understood the severity of the situations they could find themselves in.”
The girls also came up with different ways to educate the school population on how to say “no” when they felt pressured to partake in certain activities or behaviours. She said the list could give them the power to avoid doing things they do not wish to and protect themselves from potentially harmfu
