This article was written for the Trinidad Guardian on 12th Feb 2021 in response to the brutal murder of a young lady commuting home after work on the island. It happened right before our carnival period that was cancelled due to covid this year. Unfortunately, it was just one in many cases of women gone missing on the island in recent years.
Women disappear all the time in Latin America. There is even a term for them “las desaperecidas”, the ones that disappeared. I remember when I lived in Colombia there was a radio programme I used to listen to daily, where for a full chilling hour mothers would call in and plead with the public for any information on their daughters who had gone missing. Is this where Trinidad is heading?
This weekend is Carnival. In normal times we would all be gearing up for Fantastic Friday and have our favourites to win the Soca Monarch and Groovy and be debating Road March. We would have spent the week in our favourite parties waving to soca music while simultaneously quarrelling about the cost of attending them. Online we would be posting pictures of ourselves frolicking and judgmental memes of people who spend their hard-earned money on such trivialities as Carnival costumes. Instead, this year Trinis of every creed and race have indeed taken to the streets, but instead of waving rags and flags, we are holding candles and posters protesting the violence against women that plagues our land.
The country was already in a state of high tension with rampant crime, rising unemployment, economic restraints, and illegal immigration that the covid pandemic only exacerbated. In response, our politicians of both leading parties were doing what they do best; slandering and blaming the other party. Andrea’s senseless kidnapping and murder was the spark that ignited our fury. Her death came on the heels of the similar rape and murder of another young lady, Ashanti. However, both these cases as tragic as they are individually, are just two in a long list of women who have gone missing in Trinidad only to turn up dead, or to seemingly disappear from the face of the earth.
We tell our young ladies not to take PH1 taxis, to travel with a friend, to not be in the middle backseat between two people. Andrea followed all this advice. We tell our women in relationships of domestic abuse to leave the abuser. However, within recent times we have had cases of women doing just that, picking up and leaving, only to be killed by the man they left. We tell our women not to be in lonely areas, however even going for a run around the Savannah or walking through the streets Port of Spain as a woman is putting yourself on display for sooting, catcalls and the eternal “smile nuh family…” because evidently in Trinidad we are here strictly for men’s entertainment and pleasure.
In the light of Andrea’s death social media has been flooded with statuses highlighting the fact that violence against women is not a woman’s problem but a social issue. We have all seen the “raise better men” statuses, yet, a member of our Police Service goes on air to tell us women to try and talk our way out of a kidnapping. Who knows, we might have that until now untapped skill of negotiating ourselves out of a situation where a man or men are armed and ready to rape us. Our national newspaper also gave us some useful tips which included not wearing high heels in the event we would have to run for our lives. There was also a status that went viral this week lamenting the fact that women in the country are scared of men, the very people who are there to “PROTECT” (word appeared in caps in status) them.
Dear men, we appreciate your acknowledgement that there is indeed a problem, but we do not need you to PROTECT us, what we need is for you to RESPECT us. Respect our right to consent, respect our right to not smile with you if we don’t want to, respect our right to choose if we want to be in a relationship or not, respect our right to leave a relationship if we’re no longer happy in it, most importantly, respect our right to not disappear. Maybe then there would be no need for this so-called protection, or to run, or sweet talk our way out of rape.
However, the question remains, how do we change a society? Our politicians are busy arguing over the Bail Act and Evidence Amendment Bill, suspects are falling off chairs and dying, state autopsies are inconclusive, but for once we are not jammin’ still2. The sad truth is that all these changes in law cannot change a society that sees women as a commodity and these justice systems were not put in place with such high levels of crime and corruption in mind.
As Calypsonian Winston “Gypsy” Peters sang in 1986 “Captain this ship is sinking, Captain the seas are rough…Shall we abandon ship, or shall we stay on it, And perish slow, we dunno, we dunno…”
1 PH taxis in Trinidad refer to Private hire, which are members of the public who use their personal vehicles for a taxi service and therefore do not need to have been vetted by any organisation.
2Jammin’ still is from a popular soca song in Trinidad We Jammin’ Still. The message of the song is basically regardless of what ills we may be facing as a country we “jamming still”, continue to party.
