Dear Editor,
After reading about the brazen attacks on two police stations and the supreme court just before the alleged torture of a child by the police, one is led to wonder about the root cause of violent crime. American social scientist, Patrick Fagan has found a direct connection between the breakdown of families and violent crime in society, regardless of race, colour, creed, class and neighbourhood.
Children born into single-parent families are much more likely to fall into a life of crime than those from a nuclear family, regardless of wealth, status and neighbourhood. Public policy to tackle violent crime will not be very effective if it does not address the root cause of the problem. Efforts must be made to better understand how children grow into criminals and become easy puppets in the hands of extremist elements in society. Guns are not the long-term solution to the crime situation (if the spending by the joint services could have stopped crime, we would have been the safest country in the world). Rather, we require a humane public policy of nurturing young minds and providing a structure in which they can achieve their life’s potential away from crime. (I must congratulate the Ministry of Health with their Adolescent and Young Adult Health & Wellness Unit since this is exactly the kind of service children at risk need).
The state can also use its power to create a more enabling environment for the institution of marriage and for parents, especially fathers to stay in a marriage.
My humble thoughts are basically to use the tax system and the family court to incentivise parents to play an active role in their children’s lives and penalise those who are delinquent in their parental duties. The state also has a responsibility to provide a productive outlet for teenagers and young adults to channel their energies into the positive activities of sport (come on Neil, the Berbicians and Essequibians are still waiting for that Sport Complex), self-upliftment and employment.
A responsible family structure in an enabling environment will instil in youths core values which are missing in many of their lives and have directly contributed to a rise in the crime levels. It was found that the parents who abandoned their children are the principle reason for this dysfunctionality in our society, while not discounting that crime also has roots in the acculturation that took place in Guyana’s colonisation history. However, society owes itself the responsibility to undo the destructive patterns of the past to give the future generation a chance, a life if you will.
As part of sex education, young adults ought to be educated on the responsibility that comes with bringing forth a child into this world.
They should be forewarned about the pitfalls of being ill equipped to provide a stable family life for a child, which includes material, emotional and psychological security and the backlash that could follow when a child is thus deprived and finds an outlet in a life of crime. Strong family ties are the biggest weapon to reduce crime.
The scholarly evidence, in short, suggests that at the heart of the explosion of crime in the United States has been the loss of the capacity of single parents in providing adequate care for their children. This loss of love and guidance at the intimate levels of marriage and family has broad social consequences for children and for the wider community.
The empirical evidence shows that too many youths from broken families tend to have a much weaker sense of connection with their neighbourhood and are prone to exploit its members to satisfy their unmet needs or desires. This contributes to a loss of a sense of community and to the disintegration of neighbourhoods into social chaos and violent crime.
Fagan found a 10 per cent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes leads typically to a 17 per cent increase in juvenile crimes and that the rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers. Future criminal activity was seen in children rejected as early as the age of 7 years, and these children then going on to form their own group of friends, often the future delinquent gang.
What is instructive is that Fagan found that neighbourhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighbourhoods. This can suggests that the popularity of the church, temple and mosque is intertwined with crime reduction in Guyana. Spirituality is the third leg of that tripod to repair Guyana, the others being the family and the state.
What can the policy-maker do now that this information is again publicly available, since I am convinced that this is not new information to Guyana? They can:
1. Find the delinquent parents and empower them financially to stay at home with the benefits in kind directly channelled to their children (eg, free travel points to accumulate towards a short family holiday together somewhere in Guyana, compliments of the state).
2. Just as it is a crime to have sex with a willing under-age child, it must be made a crime if a child is born and the father cannot be located to sign the birth certificate application form. That child will then be placed on the state’s child register and his or her progress will be monitored by the state and the religious organisation within that community. That child will be shadowed by a willing elder from the community church, mosque or temple who is there to discuss any issues of concern such as whether the child is well fed, the issue of schooling as the child grows, etc (like a godparent).
The government social workers would also offer professional parental counselling to that child on a periodic basis. This may sound radical but this is the crux of solving Guyana’s crime problem. Too many youths of Guyana have parents who are absolving themselves of their responsibility leaving these young minds at the mercy of the delinquents in the society.
3. Engage the parents of those children on the child register into a community programme to help them heal the mind, engage in physical exercise, practical classes at cooking nutritional and healthy foods and in the art of reading. There are many organisations that can conduct such programmes at a low cost to the government (eg, Art of Living Guyana).
4. We have to repair one family at a time in Guyana until all the families are supported by a community. It is a long hard road but we have to start or else we will continue to have the Fineman 2 gang and Fineman 3 gang and the perpetual cycle of violence will continue both in and out of the state structure with no end in sight, regardless of the number of guns the police have.
5. Creating jobs to actively engage the men in society and actively follow up with family counselling nationwide is vital. This support system will be designed to offer support first at the family level, then at the community level then at the professional level, but the system must be empowered to work.
These are a few preliminary suggestions. I am sure the experts we have in family dynamics and the dynamics of the single parent family will contribute to this discourse so that we can find a long-term solution. Our crime wave seems as if it is on a tornado path to consume commissioner after commissioner and minister after minister as their policy initiatives are flawed, geared only to using violence to quell violence. The sad truth is violence begets violence.
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh