Woodbrook Government Secondary School Form Two student Xeniyah Cox says she hopes neither she nor her friends and family never have to experience Gender-Based Violence (GBV).
“God forbid it may happen to you a day, so you don’t want that to happen to you,” she says.
This is why she and her peers at the Heroes Foundation are participating in a campaign against GBV for 16 Days of Activism this year.
“You want to spread the awareness to people so they can try to stop it before it reaches further into the years and into the future,” Cox said.
According to its website, the Heroes Foundation is a registered non-profit organisation established in 2002 with a founding mission to provide a source of inspiration to T&T’s youth by fostering an appreciation of local achievers and the concept of heroism, while nurturing the next generation of heroes from the current generation of youth.
Cox has been part of the foundation for approximately eight months and during a recent GBV function at her school, she used entertainment to get her message across.
“I did a dance to portray the feeling of GBV,” she said.
Her song of choice was Believer by Imagine Dragons.
“I think it’s very important because it involves woman and I will soon be a woman,” she said.
Heroes Foundation CEO Lawrence Arjoon said Cox’s statement is exactly why it’s important to get the youth involved in these discussions.
He said adults in T&T don’t listen to children when they speak on issues and on what impacts them.
“What we want is to build a society where we people listen to children, where people take their concerns and their reports and their requests seriously,” he said.
Arjoon said equality and the elimination of abuse is an important topic for the children in their programme, one that they selected and wanted to focus on.
“Over the last year, these children have been implementing, it’s been over 45 projects that they have been implementing, 31 secondary schools across T&T, online a whole digital media campaign and in different communities where our migrant participants operate, really geared towards ending violence,” Arjoon explained.
The work done for the campaigns were posted on the foundation’s social media pages.
One of the pieces was a speech from Alicia Isaac, which performed during the same function at Woodbrook Secondary.
Issac, a Form Two student herself, also helped raise money for a GBV shelter and distributed flyers to her schoolmates.
“It is really important for the youth these days to learn about certain situations because some people are really sheltered and don’t know what is really going on, like me, I didn’t really know about GBV and many things before I joined into Heroes and I know a lot more now,” Issac said.
South East Port-of-Spain Secondary’s Sashel Ollivierre meanwhile spent her July/August vacation working on her GBV project with another member of Heroes.
“We organised a campaign about sexual harassment and how it affects both boys and girls in the school environment and why it is not right and we also, in the library, organised something where you could put your comments in,” Ollivierre said.
She said the one comment she remembered was one that read, “Stop sexual harassment, it’s uncomfortable for both boys and girls.”
Zachary Julien, of Trinity College, Moka, contributed a skit on verbal abuse for the 16 days of Activism campaign.
“In schools, it is a very natural thing that happens and it needs to stop immediately,” he said.
The Form Two student said he also educates his peers on GBV and the importance of respecting women in particular.
“I said you need to start respecting females more, stop every time you see a female, you’re like oh I want this one and that one,” he said.
Arjoon said funding for these projects comes from agencies who want to support and help children and youth in T&T, among them the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), a UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children worldwide. UNICEF is part of the EU-UN Spotlight initiative on combatting violence against women and girls. This year’s theme is “Unite!”
