Barbadians’ tendency to dismiss early warning signs of delinquent behaviour among youth is a factor in the rise in violent crime among youth, Chief Executive Officer of Supreme Counselling for Personal Development, Shawn Clarke has suggested.
His comments came in response to alarming statistics shared on Tuesday by criminologist Kim Ramsay about a decrease in the age of violent offenders.
Clarke said the contents of the crime report shared by Ramsay, showing that several young people between the ages of 11 and 15 are being charged with serious offences like murder and robbery, should surprise no one, given Barbadians’ habit of not nipping concerning behaviour in the bud.
“We have a thing in Barbados where you see a child exhibiting certain behaviours at five or six or seven years old, and you would hear ‘don’t worry about he, he will grow [out of] that’, as opposed to seeing it as a warning sign and getting the intervention needed from very early,” the youth counsellor told Barbados TODAY.
“I think we wait until these situations deteriorate, we wait until our children reach certain ages where behaviours are already embedded in them, then try to put corrective measures in place.”
While Clarke acknowledged that there was a lack of guidance in some homes and communities, he noted that poverty was a contributing factor driving youth crime.
“You are living in a household and mummy doesn’t have food on the table, there is nothing to make breakfast, and you go out there and somebody says to you, ‘I am going to give you $150 if you take out David Browne’. That $150 to you sounds like one million dollars…. If you have not received the correct . . . upbringing, as we would say, then you would be open to anything,” he said. “We really need to look at the injustices we are doing to our young people, and we need to put systems in place to save them from themselves from very early.”
Over the years, Clarke’s organisation has conducted numerous programmes within schools aimed at combating deviant behaviour, including the Olweus Bullying Prevention Programme which led to declines in bullying incidents at some schools.
The counselling expert warned about the link between bullying and both criminal behaviour and self-harm.
“I have received numerous calls from parents from schools all over Barbados who are complaining that their children are being bullied and they are not getting any satisfaction. Among those calls were about two or three suicidal attempts by young people who are being bullied. It is time really that I think we just stop all the talk and we put systems in place to really save our children,” he said.
“Not only the targets of bullying but we need to do a lot of psychological work and remedial work with the person exhibiting the bullying behaviour because statistics have proved that persons who are involved with bullying, by the time they reach age 24, have four or more convictions. That is something that we cannot overlook.” (SB)
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