Parents, guardians urged not to shy away from GBV convos with youth

Parents and guardians are being urged by Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Jacqueline Dillon, who heads the nation’s domestic violence intervention centres (DVIC), to have open discussions with their teenage children about gender-based violence (GBV) and what it means to have healthy intimate and romantic relationships.

Speaking last Tuesday at the Youth Against Gender-based Volence forum held at The Summit House (formerly Knutsford Court Hotel), Dillon emphasised that there were far too many accounts of young people facing charges for posing a danger to their romantic partners.

She pointed out that psychological trauma, suicidal thoughts, severe anxiety, and a propensity for violence were at the top of the list of issues impacting teenagers and young people.

“There are a number of adolescents and youths being charged for serious danger of their partner or even murder,” she said, adding that in many of these cases, before they reached death, entailed some graphic injuries to the individual.

Dillon continued by saying that in many households, the parents or adults in charge were of the view that young people were not yet old enough or at a stage where they needed a girlfriend or boyfriend, and that, as such, they were not ready to receive advice on how to enter a healthy romantic relationship.

“But at what point do you start to have the conversation?” Dillion questioned, adding that “the earlier you start the conversation is the more you get to educate our youths about healthy relationships, what it means to love, what are the signs to look for [to know] when to walk away and not wait until when you’re seriously injured.”

Taboo topics

Several adolescents who were in attendance at the forum and participated in the discussions emphasised that there were no standards present in today’s society by which they could be guided in how to foster healthy intimate relationships.

They lamented that romance and sexual relations were topics their parents viewed as being taboo and that they were not up for discussion within the home.

They said that, to determine what constitutes a good and negative connection with a person, they essentially had to carry out several trial-and-error experiments.

Monique Long, planning and coordination specialist at United Nations (UN) Women, who was a part of the panel discussions, noted that there was a lack of directly customised interventions for young people to help in the GBV discussions.

She continued that the “one size fits all” and “blanket” approaches and methods which were currently available within the various spaces would not be as effective in achieving the intended results of stakeholders.

Dillion, therefore, called for more positive role models and examples of what healthy relationships should look like in Jamaica.

“Relationship and domestic violence [are] the biggest hidden secret in Jamaica or in the world, more so here. I call it the hidden pandemic because nobody wants to talk about it [but] we gotta have the conversation,” Dillion said.

Long said that it was easier for people to pinpoint what people outwardly recognise as being “the harshest forms of violence and to be able to say that’s a huge red flag for me”.

She noted however, that where it became more difficult was most of the behaviours which fell “in this weird grey area, that none of us are able to have conversations about”.

She highlighted that those other forms of violence, which fall under the “grey area”, included an individual taking off a condom during sexual intercourse without the consent of the other individual and slut shaming, that is, the act of accusing someone – usually girls and women – of being “too sexual”, and using it as justification to belittling, bullying and harassing them.

“There’s a lot of persons who are not having the healthy conversations, don’t have anyone to correct the misconceptions and aren’t able to engage with each other (other youths) and to actually flesh it out,” she said, stressing the importance of youth leaders assisting in leading the charge to help educate others.

Dillon stated that the curriculum for basic training within the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) now includes a component of GBV and that the unit was currently working on associate degree level of specialised training for GBV to be offered by the national police college of Jamaica.

She said that since 2021, some 602 police officers have been trained under GBV up to September this year by the DVIC unit.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com