After the condolences, candles, and mourning: A call to action

We were still expressing our deepest condolences to the family of 22-year-old Aleandra Lett Hypolite when another young woman, 18-year-old Terrecheal Sebastian was brutally murdered, this time by her partner.

Another family fractured and in pain. We must do more than extend compassion and hold vigils.

Let us be clear: these 2 vicious and brutal sexual and gender-based murders are merely the tip of the iceberg of far, far greater unexposed violence against women across our land.

We must reach a point where vigils are no longer necessary. This moment must be a turning point. Sexual and gender-based violence is not only a problem for the police, the government, churches or schools — it is a problem for all of us.

We are all complicit. In one way or another, we all contribute to our culture of violence against women, sexual ignorance of our adolescents, patriarchal control, and even worse, misogyny. We sustain this culture of cruelty and violence.

Until we can see ourselves as contributors to our culture of dominating, suppressing, and abusing women, we cannot find our way to addressing the problem. We will continue to externalise the problem and blame others for our despicable situation. We need to look in the mirror. We must ask: What can we do? “If you see something, say something.” We must stop being bystanders.

We do very little by way of educating our children about sex, sexual predation, sexual violence, conflict resolution, the law, and the consequences of their actions. The most important subject for adolescent well-being is Health and Family Life Education (HFLE), but it is optional and is treated as a low priority. In the few schools that choose to offer HFLE, students are not assessed, so we have no way of knowing whether they understand how to make good decisions. In trying to shield them from the wretchedness around them, we instead leave them uninformed and vulnerable, which also negatively affects them as adults.

Our knee-jerk default is to scream for harsher punishments. Yet our incarceration rates show high re-offending and little or no behaviour change. Sadly, this is again established in our recent catastrophes.

Our Call to Action

Considering these recent tragedies, we urgently call citizens in all communities to:

1. Be more vigilant in observing and reporting gender-based violence
2. Encourage parents to speak with their children about sex and gender-based violence
3. Learn more about the HFLE instruction in schools
4. Demand that our churches engage in guiding adolescents in sexual prudence
5. Insist that anti-violence training is embedded in health and social work curricula

We must also press the Government to:

1. Enact Dangerous Offender legislation to ensure stronger oversight of high-risk violent offenders
2. Implement a national Sex Offenders Registry with clear public notification protocols
3. Activate the GBV Coordinating Mechanism to improve cross-agency response, prevention, and accountability
4. Strengthen mental-health services as an essential component of GBV and violence-prevention strategies
5. Scale-up programmes such as the Legal Aid and Counselling Clinic’s (LACC) Man-to-Man programme to help men stop violence, learn skills to address conflict and respond to stress, and take responsibility for their actions
6. Put the mechanisms and resources in place to operationalise the GBV One-Stop Centre

We must move from candles to can-do.

Sincerely,

Tonia Frame, President, Grenada Planned Parenthood Association (GPPA)
Fred Nunes, Consultant, Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity (ASPIRE)

Dr Tonia Frame is the President of the Grenada Planned Parenthood Association (GPPA), a Trustee of the Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation (CFPA) and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at St George’s University.

Dr Fred Nunes is the founder of ASPIRE — Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity, Advisor to the CFPA and GPPA, and is a former Head of Management Studies at The UWI, Mona.