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It’s a little bit uncanny that I had wanted to return to discussing trauma, particularly the impact of bullying, before the issue raised itself vehemently in the public space.
The story of five years of alleged physical abuse at St Mary’s College suffered by a student, who was expelled when he finally retaliated in kind to the man who is now Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, unearthed a dirty puddle that many more than we think have splashed about in.
Photo: Getty.
Predictably, the political bigots surged forward, trying to distract from what ought to be a catalyst for a national confrontation of the prevalence and destructiveness of this shameful characteristic of our society.
If we care about our future, we should ignore them and focus on the things we have ignored for far too long.
It is unfortunate that the Prime Minister did not grasp the opportunity to emphasise the point he had made just days before that he was committed to transparency and justice.
To locate this within the parameters of something that had happened 33 years ago, without saying what his actual role was, without apologising to the people he had bullied, and skirting around the issue generally is alarming and disappointing.
Photo: PNM.
If we convince ourselves that this is about the repeated actions of a 17-year-old, we are missing what has been actually laid bare before us.
Comments online have been intense. Lasana Liburd, a journalist whose integrity is irrefutable, was moved to defend his former classmate because he witnessed what had been going on for years.
People attacked him, suggesting that he was the one who initiated the surfacing of this story—but Lasana pelted no stones. He did what he felt compelled to do in the name of fairness.
In a balanced piece, he invoked the prevalence of bullying in schools as he described the culture of his alma mater. Obviously, many people could identify with that culture—and many did, coming online to say how they were bullied, and how they bullied too.
The prestige schools have taken a hit, particularly the ones for boys, though the girls have their fair share.
Has anyone even thought about the horrifying violence that is now common in schools that fall outside of the prestige bracket?
Videos surface of brawling students for everyone to condemn. Who is to say this is not the same at the institutions of privilege? Perhaps they are better equipped to keep it under wraps.
Is that one of our dirty little secrets?
Photo: Allan V Crane/ Wired868.
Evidently, there was a cover-up all those years ago, and the outcome could only have been what it was because the administration ‘fixed’ things.
We live in a small country, and for all the busybodies blaring their three or four thoughts on social media, there are many who talk offline.
Not everyone has the guts of Lasana to go brave with what they know—most are rightly afraid of victimisation—but people will corroborate privately what they do not dare to do publicly.
When you have collected enough stories saying the same thing independently, you get the picture whether or not you can call the names of your sources.
Photo: Office of the Prime Minister.
But even if the Prime Minister missed the opportunity to bring something meaningful to this necessary discussion, as citizens, we can initiate our own conversation for our own sake.
In the first place, we can ask ourselves some difficult questions. Why do people bully? There is most likely a root in some kind of trauma. Was the Prime Minister traumatised in his early years?
Lasana followed his post on Wired868 with one on his Facebook page, sharing some of his own schoolboy behaviours, of which he said he was not proud.
He unearthed it, he told me, because writing about what he had witnessed at CIC brought back memories. He put it to good use. “I think this might actually be a good opportunity to look at bullying in school and our own childhoods,” he wrote.
The point being made that 33 years is too long ago to dredge up these stories is fallacious at best.
Trauma remains. It haunts. It affects life choices.
This society emerged from a traumatic past at many levels. CLR James had written in Beyond a Boundary about the British code of the stiff upper lip that had been deeply ingrained in the childhood mind.
A gentleman’s code, it frowned on the notion of revealing one’s torments or one’s tormentors. It allowed bullying to flourish because if one reported it, one would be deemed a snitch, and ostracised and penalised.
Being puny, being portly, being poor were among the conditions that made targets of youngsters.
Too often, the cool crowd comprised those of “elite” backgrounds: entitled, mean and arrogant. In one’s teenaged years, and I suppose, even in adulthood, humiliation is traumatic.
We have perpetuated much of that culture in the way we pay allegiance to the accumulation of the trappings of financial wealth.
Bullying exists everywhere.
Schools are where they take root, but they follow us into our adult lives. It has become so normalised that one of the common comments has been that it exists everywhere, so stop complaining; it’s a way of life.
We don’t have to let it be, because it is sickening and wrong.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
