The vicious cycle of crime and poverty

Jul 10, 2010 Editorial

Child abandonment is a common feature these days. Parents are developing the same attitudes of the lower animals. They are producing children, nursing them until they are able to walk and then moving on to go about their business until they are ready to produce another offspring.
This is responsible for the many young deviants in society with no one to tell them right from wrong, with no one there to guide them to develop into useful citizens capable of taking their place in the society.
We have already spoken about the number of teenaged criminals and about the growing number of illiterates in the society. We have also spoken about the absent fathers who seem only interested in the act of producing children. They keep moving on to do the same with any willing woman. In short, they are operating as the classical sperm donors and this has serious consequences for the society.
This pattern of behaviour is not new but over the years the society ignored the development largely because many of these people came from the lower echelons of the society. The society operated as though the people at the bottom of the social leader would never impact on the future of the country. This was what the colonial masters would have us believe and believe we did.
The result is that the very society, through its law enforcement arm, is seeking to eliminate the very dregs of the society although the rate of production of the dregs is astonishing. This is a tall order because more and more dysfunctional families are emerging and the number of delinquents is growing in direct proportion to the dysfunctional families.
What is worrying is that the society saw this happening years ago. A previous administration opted to take control of the wandering young people. For those who were not academically capable the administration had them attend institutions created just for the purpose of teaching these people skills that they could use later in life. The focus, then, was to have every member of society being trained to play a meaningful role.
There was the Guyana National Service that catered for hundreds of young people at a time. Both men and women were trained. Today they are among the skilled in the society. There were also the families who did not take kindly to their young children being removed from the homes although these very parents could scarcely control the very youth.
The result is that national service has all but disappeared and in its place, a large number of young people establishing criminal enterprise. That many of these enterprises are headed by people no older than 17 years tell a story.
There is more. The government is now pressed to create social services that are at best, stop gap measures. In most cases the services do no more than provide a modicum of food and shelter and ensure that those children of school age attend school.
This is being done at a cost that runs into the millions of dollars with no long term beneficial results. The way to go is to spend some of that money into residential training facilities similar to what operated in the past. We have seen the products of such training institutions, some of them reaching near the pinnacle of law enforcement institutions in the country.
Many of these children are crying for help. They are not prepared for the world of work because of their poor academic level; their parents (read that to mean mothers) have no disposable income so they readily try to push the elder children out of the nest to ease their financial burden.
The frightening reality is that the cycle of poverty keeps expanding and while the government is talking about creating jobs it may find that it has a large but inadequate workforce. There is also the likelihood of foreign investors being unable to find local workers and this is going to raise the old criticism of foreigners ignoring local labour.
We refuse to believe that Guyana is choking itself but it is time the government and no one else initiate programmes to endow young and perhaps helpless young people with skills. In the long run, that may be the only way to combat rising crime in this country.

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