“No child in this country should ever have their future stolen by violence, and no family should ever have to carry this kind of pain.”
Those were the words offered by T&T’s top cop in his response to the killing of Mercedez Layne.
These are good words from good intentions among other moving declarations, loud pleas, solidarity marches, and more actions as a reaction to the death of Mercedez Layne. But I remain tortured by the history of violence against children.
Truthfully, I am sick to the core attempting to write this column as part of the series on trauma especially looking in the other direction of what children suffer that predict who or what they become in adulthood.
My chest feels compressed by the history, past and recent, of these heinous crimes against children. In fact, heinous crimes in T&T over the years account in part for the anxiety I manage.
It was only last month we were outraged for two-year-old Angelo Tobias Plaza in Tobago, and while that grief is still ripe, as a nation we must find courage to face the death of 12-year-old Mercedez.
This trauma has caused a retraumatising of a people with the evocation of death and crimes against children, young adults and adults that ripped our innards. The sexual homicides of six-year-old Sean Luke in 2006 and 11-year-old Akiel Chambers in 1998 were referenced.
Radha Pixie Lakhan and Andrea Bharatt’s names were also evoked as killings that have brought us to the point of outrage and solemn declarations, vigils, marches, and protest as the criminals continue to strike time and again.
Pixie, as she was called, was a 16-year-old secondary school student of Siparia, who was violated and strangled to death in 2005. Her body was found a month later.
In 2021, Andrea Bharatt, a 23-year-old court clerk at the Arima Magistrates’ Court, was kidnapped and her body found seven days later in the Heights of Aripo.
These are only a few of the moments of national grief. These were among moments when there were national outcry and moving speeches for greater protection of our women and children.
From my knowledge and experience, there are subsets of questions I am forever interrogating to process the pain and grief. As I continue to gaze at the mind of man and how broken we all are, my spirit begs for something deeper in T&T that wants to invest itself in the root of our issues.
Alongside my grief is always the question about the violence that is hidden. My thinking is that for every eruption in our society, there are many aggressions that have gone unnoticed by the public or remain ignored by witnesses.
“Such violence remains hidden in many instances because children are often afraid to report acts of aggression, and because reporting mechanisms tend to be inaccessible or even non-existent,” says a 2019 United Nation global study on homicide, subtitled “Killing of children and young adults” (www.unodc.org).
“Children may also keep silent about the violence they suffer when it is perpetrated by parents and other family members, or by another figure of authority,” the study says.
Children are killed in many contexts and there is no single profile for child killers. Motivation varies depending on relationship between children and offenders, but when we see intrafamilial child killings, the literature suggests that violence was being perpetrated over long periods of time and the killing is usually a culmination.
The presence of stepchildren in the home is a known risk factor for violence as is separation or parents. But “no single behaviour means a person is on a path to committing targeted violence, but multiple concerning behaviours may indicate cause for concern,” FBI profiling literature says (www.fbi.gov/how-we-investigate/behavioral-analysis).
In a country where violence and deaths are forever our headlines, it is becoming difficult to partition the grief but heinous crimes against women and children always come with a depth of pain and an expected outcry.
Last Saturday evening, Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles spoke at the vigil for Mercedez and is reported as saying, “When you think about a country, you think about how it treats its children and how it treats its women.”
But that violence is not separate from the other aspects of criminality/violence on our country. We reference violence against women and children, and while that is acceptable, the perpetrators are a huge part of that equation that we must find ways to address. They are not cowed by our marches or speeches.
The CoP is reported as saying, “Our children deserve to grow up safe, protected and surrounded by a society that values their innocence,” and that “the (police service) will continue to do everything in our power to shield them from harm and to hold accountable anyone who threatens their safety.”
I say start with Richard Renalis, the 26-year-old Palo Seco man, charged with Mercedez’s murder. What’s his trauma? What broke in him? Who saw it and pretended it was not there? Who stayed silent? Where is the plan to address the root issues of the violence that is defining our society?
