UWI IGDS/BATT Break the Silence Project brings national stakeholders together for course on protecting youth from sexual abuse
Participants of the short course. PHOTO: ASHA INNISS
A safe space can mean different things to different people. For marginalised and vulnerable communities, creating safe spaces is crucial— but it is equally crucial that they be tailored to the specific needs of the community they are designed to serve.
Children are a particularly vulnerable community, and notably, boys and girls experience insecurity differently. To make spaces safer for our children, there needs to be work across agencies and organisations that deal with child welfare. The Institute for Gender and Development Studies St Augustine Unit (IGDS SAU) has long been working on initiatives surrounding the safety of children, with their Break the Silence project focusing on the elimination of child sexual abuse (CSA).
Break the Silence has been in existence since 2008, but more recently, the IGDS/BATT Break the Silence Project, “Enhancing Evidence-Based Advocacy: Developing IGDS Mainstreaming, Mentorship and Movement Building”, in collaboration with Dr Keisha Thompson, Professor of Psychology at Kingsborough College, designed a short course titled, “Safe Spaces for Children: Understanding and Creating a Safe Space in the Context of Child Sexual Abuse”.
This initiative was another phase of the project, rolled out in collaboration with the Bankers Association of Trinidad and Tobago (BATT), with the aim of training workers across a range of institutions that deal with child welfare to foster and build safe spaces for children. BATT provided invaluable support to this work by strengthening the Break the Silence in its capacity to partner with those involved in the national response to CSA.
Khadijah Pierre, project coordinator for the IGDS/BATT Break the Silence initiative, has overseen a series of activities, including the short course that was held in April. The genesis of the idea came out of a panel discussion held by the IGDS a year earlier, where there was a meeting of minds including teachers, counsellors, social workers, and representatives from various ministries.
“We were realising that amongst all of the other issues that we see when it comes to child sexual abuse, having or knowing how to build a safe space was something that people needed to build capacity on,” says Pierre.
“Dr Thompson [course facilitator] not only addressed the physical safe spaces which we tend to always focus on, but she also spoke to the psychological safe spaces and the social safe spaces that often get overlooked,” Pierre explains.
The course was attended by teachers, and workers from a range of organisations including members of the Ministry of Youth Development and National Service; the Office of the Prime Minister’s Division of Gender and Child Affairs; Children’s Authority; the Student Support Services Unit from the Tobago House of Assembly’s Division of Education, Research and Technology; and the TTPS Special Victims Unit.
The course ran over the span of four days, and those present created an “action plan matrix” that would help them use these tools in their own fields to better respond to children of different developmental stages and support needs.
The course has two other goals: to spark collaboration between these organisations and IGDS SAU, and to help create a thriving network.
For more information on Break the Silence, go to sta.uwi.edu/igds/breakthesilence/.
