Sounding the alarm

One sunny afternoon, some years ago, I witnessed raw, sadistic cruelty being delivered upon a small boy of 12 or 13 – about the age of my son at the time. I was in my car, parked and waiting for a friend who was making a delivery in the house opposite.

When I heard the first doleful howl, I thought that a child had fallen from a swing or tree or had been stung by jack spaniards while throwing stones at a ripe mango. The screaming persisted and grew in intensity, so I got out of the car and looked to see what was happening.

I saw a large shirtless man dragging a little boy onto the balcony of a two-storey house delivering heavy blows with a thick leather belt on the head, back, hands and backside of the child.

“Kneel down! Kneel down!” I heard. Then the most alarming instruction as the blows continued: “Now pray! Lemme see you pray!”

At this point, there appeared little for me to do than to shout: “Hey!” at the top of my voice. The startled man looked at me for a split second, then turned quietly and left the child, sobbing and kneeling, hands clasped in fake prayer. I don’t know what transpired after I left.

In that moment, I realised I was teaching myself the lesson of sounding a critical alarm. True, this appeared to be a violent, criminal assault. But which police officer at which police station would have acted on this?

Caning, tapping, giving licks, pinching, and squeezing have long been normalised in the delivery of lessons on “discipline”. My adult son, now an exemplary citizen, never experienced any of this.

No, we have not all turned out right because of licks. We are today a sick, depraved, violent society in part, but not wholly, because of this.

“I got licks and I turned out alright,” we so often hear. Then you look at the speaker and you understand why violence and force are so heavily routinised in everyday human behaviour here. No, sir/madam, you did not turn out “okay”. We have not, as a society, turned out “okay”.

Maybe Prof. Deosaran et al have done the research to find how many current prison inmates routinely received “licks” as children. I strongly suspect that the vast majority have themselves been the victims of such torture and violence.

In fact, much like the Tunapuna child some years ago, I am almost certain that both “licks” and coercive religious practice were standard practice in the households and schools from which these criminals emerged.

Relatedly, I am aware of a current effort to deliver “values training” at a selection of denominational schools, as a complement to “religious” education. Hopefully, the former completely replaces the latter. More of this as the project unfolds. But the developers of this programme appear to be on to something.

But back to the most common form of domestic violence and its contribution to criminal conduct. Nobody has been sounding alarms of any kind because almost everybody is certain nothing wrong is taking place. But no. We have not all turned out “okay” despite the fact that there has been no shortage of licks, church, temple, and mosque.

There are politicians today, who have received licks and pray every day, advocating more violence to counter violence. There are holy folks delivering verdicts of death upon people whose gender identity is not in compliance with their belief systems. Death, metaphorically or not, as an ultimate consequence.

This, of course, is not to say that we line up like sitting ducks. We are individually and collectively entitled to defend ourselves – though we are these days witnessing from close and afar a version of “self-defence” that is disproportionately deadly.

Through all of this, we find children – victims of every conceivable form of human wrongdoing. Wars. Combative politics. Forced displacement. Cultural norms, some of which are glorified as ancient cultural practice – child marriage, female genital mutilation, sexual initiation, human trafficking, and other forms of exploitative violence.

I read journalist, Janelle De Souza’s fine piece on child sexual abuse in last Sunday’s Newsday and wondered about the official records contrasted against silent realities. Those times when nobody sounded an alarm. When people knew … but chose to keep silent.

I also saw the reports about the two east Trinidad toddlers, disheveled and alone. Who paid meaningful attention? Who thought this could have been “okay” under any set of circumstances? Who has been measuring the parlous state of our humanity? Who has been sounding the alarm?