The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice re­ports on gen­der-based vi­o­lence are hor­ri­fy­ing in their graph­ic de­tail about the in­ci­dence and na­ture of vi­o­lence and its preva­lence against women and girls. What the re­ports from the Spe­cial Vic­tims De­part­ment and the Child Pro­tec­tion Unit of the TTPS do is blow up a pic­ture of the ex­tent of the hate held by too many men and how they act out their dev­il­ish ways against fe­males.

What is even more in­com­pre­hen­si­ble is that in many in­stances the women who come un­der the in­hu­mane vi­o­lence are those who the men, at one point, pro­fessed com­mit­ment to, de­vot­ed love for and vowed to pro­tect their part­ners whether in front of a mar­riage of­fi­cer or com­mon law re­la­tion­ships.  

The sta­tis­tics, in brief, in­di­cate that the po­lice re­ceived 14,296 re­ports of vi­o­lence in­volv­ing in­ti­mate part­ners and 4,667 re­ports of women and girls be­ing the vic­tims of sex­u­al vi­o­lence over the pe­ri­od 2018-2022.

The de­tails of the vi­o­lence get even more dev­il­ish. The Child Pro­tec­tion Unit of the TTPS re­ports 10,311 sex­u­al of­fences, phys­i­cal aban­don­ment, ne­glect and mis­treat­ment of chil­dren un­der the age of 16 years. In ad­di­tion, there were 5, 026 re­ports of sex­u­al vi­o­lence re­port­ed dur­ing the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 2022 to Oc­to­ber 2O24. There are oth­er stats just as fright­en­ing. The gen­der ex­perts re­fer to the form of vi­o­lent treat­ment list­ed above as misog­y­ny – the dic­tio­nary de­f­i­n­i­tion of the term casts it as “ha­tred of women”.

The first point to be made here is the ex­pec­ta­tion that the po­lice ser­vice has been en­gaged in a sys­tem­at­ic and pro­fes­sion­al analy­sis of the da­ta col­lect­ed to find trends, ways and means to gain po­lice in­tel­li­gence to de­tect and pros­e­cute of­fend­ers. It can­not be that the da­ta gath­ered and the re­ports pre­pared are mere­ly for dis­play.

So, too, the analy­sis of the da­ta must pro­vide in­for­ma­tion and warn­ings to women in par­tic­u­lar and the gen­er­al pub­lic to de­tect per­son­al­i­ty traits and trends in men and what can be rea­son­ably ex­pect­ed of them in terms of their be­hav­iours in re­la­tion­ships. 

The analy­sis of the da­ta of over­all be­hav­iours must in­form the rel­e­vant agen­cies, pro­fes­sion­al as­so­ci­a­tions, gov­ern­ment so­cial ser­vices and the like, to pro­vide an­swers to crit­i­cal ques­tions sur­round­ing this ex­treme of male vi­o­lence against women. Among the ques­tions to be asked and an­swered by the re­search are the ori­gins of the deep male hate against women that is man­i­fest­ing it­self in the da­ta cit­ed above and the re­al­i­ty of to­day. 

There have al­so been claims that there are men, in­se­cure and “tot­ing” a sense of in­fe­ri­or­i­ty when com­pared to their fe­male part­ners, the women be­ing high achiev­ers; in­stead of re­act­ing with pride, the men use vi­o­lence to “cut their part­ners down to their size.”

How can men be re­trieved from this con­di­tion of seek­ing vi­o­lence to con­front what­ev­er prob­lems they may have in their re­la­tion­ships with women? How is the nur­tur­ing of young boys in­to a new eth­ic of love and de­vo­tion to women to be pur­sued?

Some crim­i­nals have con­fessed to nev­er ex­pe­ri­enc­ing hu­man, non-sex­u­al love ex­tend­ed to them; they know noth­ing of treat­ing women in a lov­ing and car­ing man­ner.

Our civil­i­sa­tion is at se­ri­ous risk of im­plod­ing.