Giving Compass' Take:

• Isabel Kubabom reports that women and girls living in Trinidad and Tobago are learning to protect themselves from the pervasive problem of gender-based violence and how to talk about it among one another. 

• Initiatives such as Girls Stand Up are working towards mobilizing communities of young girls to stand up for themselves.  Do you think that these empowerment mobilization tactics are more effective when it comes to stopping violence in a community? Or are there other successful approaches? 

• Read about the root causes of gender-based violence to get a deeper understanding of how this problem persists within different communities around the world. 

As Ken watched the flurry of activity among the young girls in the high school auditorium, he was stunned. While he had hoped that the educational program on gender-based violence (GBV) for Trinidadian high school girls would be a success, he had not anticipated just how much the girls would enjoy it.  His only disappointment was that it was all coming to an end – limited funding only allowed the program to run for 12 months.

34-year-old Ken Ramdhan is the Youth Education Manager at Families in Action, a non-profit organization that provides services addressing drug and other addictions, family and relationship conflict, parenting and youth education in Trinidad & Tobago.

Ken works to ensure that young people receive the guidance and support they need to live safe, healthy and meaningful lives. This put him in a prime position to lead the initiative, ‘Girls Stand Up’, in partnership with PSI. The program was carried out in four high schools across Trinidad and focused on creating and training ‘action groups’ to help raise awareness and educate the other students on gender-based violence. But as the program came to an end, there was still much work to be done.

In Trinidad and Tobago, gender-based violence is rampant, with a staggering number of reported cases of violence against girls and women. Interpersonal violence (including gender-based violence and rape) ranks fifth out of 44 disease areas, accounting for 5.4 percent of the total years of lives lost due to premature deaths.

With the Girls Stand Up program, the idea was to educate and empower the girls while giving them the tools to facilitate discussion about gender-based violence among their peers.

Read the full article about gender-based violence by Isabel Kubabom at Impact.