(Jamaica Observer) – As Jamaica continues to struggle with the rising incidence of serious crimes among young people, Commonwealth Secretary-General Baroness Patricia Scotland argues that the problem is not unique to the island and that the best way to address the situation is to reduce the exposure of children to abusive circumstances.
“You only need to turn on your TVs to realise that crime is a globalised problem – young men who feel disassociated, underemployed, misdirected and in need of their brothers. It’s not, unfortunately, an isolated issue,” Scotland told young people at a town hall meeting at the University of the West Indies (UWI) regional headquarters in St Andrew on Friday.
Scotland, the first female head of the Commonwealth Secretariat, was in Jamaica to launch a Commonwealth collaboration on youth leadership with UWI and Common Purpose, a development charity. She was fresh from a two-day summit with Caricom heads in Guyana.
“This initiative will really give young people, who represent 60 per cent of the Commonwealth’s more than two billion population, a voice on key national, regional and global issues, equip them with leadership skills and provide them with the networks and opportunities to really make a difference in their communities and across the globe,” Scotland has previously said of the youth leadership project.
On Friday, she explained that her opinion that domestic violence featured largely in offenders’ lives prior to their committing crimes was based on analysis of cases brought before her while serving as Minister of State for Criminal Justice and Law Reform with specific responsibility for offender management and youth justice from 2003-2007 in the United Kingdom.
“I looked at the most violent crimes and you know what I found? The greatest issue was domestic violence. Domestic violence accounted for 25 per cent of all violent crime, it killed 120 women every year – that was two or three women every single week by their partner or their ex-partner. When I looked at whom I had in prison, 89 per cent of the women had a history of domestic violence or sexual assault before they got involved in crime. When I went to the juvenile estate two-thirds of those children came from domestic violence homes and when I went to the male estate, most of those men had graduated from the juvenile estate,” Baroness Scotland revealed.
The Dominican-born said that the grim statistics delineate a picture of the oppressive, parasitic qualities of domestic abuse on those exposed to it and urged that better care be taken when rearing children.
“If you want to stop crime, you have to go right back and look at how those children are being brought up and what they are living with every single day. So as we look for ways to reduce violent crime among young men I say do not wait until they have a gun in their hand at age 15 to do something about it, start early, start now,” Baroness Scotland urged.
In tandem with that, Scotland said, the number of children in state care needs to be lowered.
“There is clear evidence that there is a direct correlation between what a child achieves at 22 months and what that individual will achieve at 22 years and we have within our Commonwealth eight million children in institutional care who are beyond the age of three. So there are eight million children in our Commonwealth who have a very low expectation of achieving and we need to do something about it,” Scotland charged.
She said the issues with which the youth contend daily require a commitment by the 53 countries in the Commonwealth to tackle in an effort to ensure that a stronger union is created, reducing the possibility of a need to continue reinventing the wheel.
“The work that we do in our communities is very important and I will also say this: many of these young men are looking for something to belong to, to have someone believe in them and one of our problems is that we have become a very materialistic community and we have failed to understand that part of our humanity is that we have a spirit and the spirit craves to belong to something and if you don’t give someone good to belong to they will find something bad,” the SG said. The town hall meeting brought to a close a four-day workshop, as part of the baroness’ Secretary-General challenge, themed 33Sixty. The programme derived its name from the fact that 33 per cent of the world’s population live in the Commonwealth, and 60 per cent of those are under age 30. Scotland initiated it to encourage aspiring young leaders in the Commonwealth to explore some of the world’s most pressing issues, while developing solutions with a special interest in goal 11 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: “What can our generation of the Commonwealth do now to make our cities more inclusive and safe by 2030?”
