This week’s Bookshelf sets fiction aside to engage with fact. These are the stories of women who are no longer here to tell them. In the Caribbean like everywhere else violence begins at home, behind closed doors, in the places meant to offer shelter. It thrives in silence, in what is tolerated.
It begins in language that reduces brutality to “family business”. It pretends to be about protection but is really about control It begins with neighbours who look away and systems that promise protection but too often deliver nothing.
You know the story.
The body of 20-year-old Savanna Dyer was found on June 14, 2025, and discarded on the roadside in Carlsen Field, Chaguanas, Trinidad. A security guard—someone trusted to protect—has been charged with her murder. Her name joins a list that grows longer each year. In 2024, T&T recorded 624 murders, making this one of the most violent countries per capita in the Americas (Trinidad and Tobago Police Service Annual Statistics, 2024). Among the dead were at least 40 women, most killed by men they knew and 14 involved victims with existing protection orders (TTPS Annual Statistics, 2024).
What remains of their lives are fragments in news reports: where they were last seen, how they died, and who is blamed. The rest—what they dreamed of, how they laughed, the private details that made them who they were—has vanished. These are women who did not live to tell their stories. I write this on their behalf.
Across Latin America and the Caribbean, at least 11 women are killed every day because they are women, amounting to nearly 4,000 lives lost in 2023 (UN Women Caribbean, 2023 Femicide Report).
Illegal guns have made the violence deadlier. A quarrel turns fatal in seconds. Survivors are left with nowhere to run, and no one to call. There is no mystery to the crisis.
Over the past five years, reports of domestic violence have soared, from 528 cases in 2019 to 2,646 in 2023 (Trinidad and Tobago Police Service Domestic Violence Unit, 2023). More women have called for help. More have been failed. The laws exist, but without the will or systems to enforce them, they are little more than words on paper.
Across the world, the crisis of violence against women mirrors what we see in the Caribbean. The United Nations estimates that, on average, 140 women are killed each day by a partner or family member worldwide, amounting to over 51,000 women in 2023 (UNODC and UN Women, Gender-related killings of women and girls (femicide/feminicide, 2023).
In Trinidad it has been documented in literature and has long been fought for in law.
Few have done more in this battle than Diana Mahabir-Wyatt. When domestic violence was dismissed as “other people’s business” Mahabir-Wyatt forced the country to see it as a crime. She was among those who helped shape the Domestic Violence Act, giving legal language to what had been unspoken (Domestic Violence Act of Trinidad and Tobago, 1991). Mahabir-Wyatt saw that laws alone would not keep women safe. So she built shelters. She co-founded the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She created Childline, ensuring that the smallest voices—the ones most easily ignored—would be heard.
In Parliament, Mahabir-Wyatt fought for amendments to strengthen protection. Outside Parliament, she created the structures that made protection possible. Every woman who has found refuge in a shelter, every protection order that has been enforced, bears traces of her work. Yet the violence persists. She would have been the first to remind us that the work is not done.
What drives domestic violence? Poverty. Gender inequality. Weak legal systems. Cultural norms that excuse or hide abuse. Ignorance. A need for power from men who lack agency elsewhere.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that nearly one in three women globally has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by a non-partner, at some point in their lives. Where laws are strongest and women’s rights protected in practice—as in parts of Europe—rates are lowest. Where laws exist but remain unenforced, or where women have no safe recourse, (South-East Asia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa), the Caribbean and Latin America) the killings continue. (World Health Organization, Violence Against Women Prevalence Estimates, 2018).
Our writers get it. In The Bread the Devil Knead, Lisa Allen-Agostini offers a portrait of a Port-of-Spain where women navigate danger at every turn (Myriad Editions, 2021). Her prose reminds us of the violence, of the uneasy, ever-present sense of threat that marks a woman’s daily life.
The fear while leaving and returning home, opening a gate, running to the car in the dusk, in a lift, in a quiet building. Women are always walking around clutching keys, and pepper spray, watching our backs.
Studies from the Caribbean Development Bank and UN Women show that up to one in three women in some islands report having experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner (UN Women Caribbean & CDB, Gender Equality Study 2020).
In Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana—wherever you look—the stories are the same. A woman reports abuse; she is told to try harder to make it work. A protection order is granted; it is not enforced. A shelter is needed; it is full. The killings that follow are treated as if no other outcome could have been expected. Each statistic masks what it means to live with fear in one’s own home.
This is not a crisis of ignorance. We know what to do. The question is whether we will do it. Whether we will build the shelters, train the police, strengthen the laws, and—most of all—act as if women’s lives matter as much as we say they do. Whether we will teach our sons that violence is not power, that no one has the right to harm another, that love is not ownership.
The task of writing is to refuse forgetting. Savanna Dyer. Andrea Bharatt. Ashanti Riley. Names that should not have had to survive in this way, as cautionary tales or headlines. Names that should have outlived the vigils. Their lives should have been full of the ordinary: love, work, disappointment, joy. Instead, they are gone, and the stories they might have told are left to others. Literature becomes the archive. It asks us not just to see, but to care, and to act.
Diana Mahabir-Wyatt’s work has been the same. She did not allow violence to grow monstrous behind closed doors. She demanded that the country see what it tried not to see. Her legacy is the shelters that exist, the laws that protect, and the words we now have for what was once unspeakable. But a legacy is only a beginning. It is up to all of us to finish what she began.
The murders of women in this region are not accidents. They are outcomes of choices—political, legal, and cultural. We can choose differently. We can decide that these lives, these stories, matter enough to change how we live, govern, and care. Or we can continue as we are, allowing 11 women killed daily in the Caribbean to become ordinary, letting vigils stand in for action, letting grief replace justice.
For the women who did not live to tell their stories, we owe more than memory. We owe change.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
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