Children in Carnival

The authorities — whoever they may be — clearly have to make a decision about the involvement of young people in Carnival. Whatever trouble the youths get into, whether inside or outside the Carnival season, blame cannot ultimately be attached to them. Young people are mimics. They mimic one another in order to fit in, and the group as a whole mimics the adult group. This mimicry is not obvious: Young people go to great lengths to distinguish themselves from old people by dressing and speaking differently. But young people must also fit into the wider society, so they absorb the values and general behaviour of adults.

So, inasmuch as it is adults who drink to excess and “get on bad” in public, moreso at Carnival time, the youths naturally imbibe the behaviour and values of this culture. In this sense, adults cannot divorce themselves from ultimate responsibility for our wayward youth.  The young people, after all, have not developed in a separate cultural dimension. Take the Youthfest two weeks ago, which caused a minor furore because alcohol was sold at the event. The bar owners’ lame excuse was that the police were supposed to check whether the persons who were buying alcohol were of legal age or not. Even if this were part of the officers’ duties, it would seem far more practical for the bartenders to refuse to sell anyone who looked under-age. The truth, of course, is that the bar owners couldn’t have cared less who was under-age or not: They were there to make money.

The proper, if imperfect, solution is to ban the sale of any alcohol at all events targetted at youths. The solution is imperfect because young people who want to drink alcohol will always find ways to do so. But this doesn’t mean that it should be easy. The irresponsibility of the adults in this case — from the Government ministries to the event organisers to the bar owners to the police officers — is directly connected to youthful carelessness. The second and more serious incident was last Friday’s detainment of 70 teenagers at a Carnival programme on the Brian Lara Promenade. This incident revealed everything that is wrong with how we involve youths in Carnival. According to newspaper reports, the genesis of Friday’s incident lay in a police officer telling a 14-year-old schoolgirl that she had to go home unless accompanied by her parents.

What law the officer was invoking we do not know. However, it seems that the schoolgirl and some of her friends responded aggressively, resulting in the police detaining 70 students at the Besson Street Police Station, and eventually charging three of them. The question is, could this entire situation have been avoided? In the immediate context, we wonder how the officer in question approached the student. Was his warning couched as a friendly suggestion or as an aggressive threat? If it was the latter — and, given the reputation the Police Service has acquired, most citizens would readily believe this — then the reaction of the student and her friends, if not excusable, is certainly understandable. But even if the officer was civil in his approach, another question arises: Whether the behaviour of the young people was such as to require police intervention? Perhaps so, perhaps not. We will never know.

On the face of it, however, it seems that properly-trained officers would have known how to maintain order without getting people’s hackles raised. Again we can posit a connection between the indiscipline of the adults involved and that of the youths. It is therefore clear that Carnival events involving mostly teenagers need to have particular safeguards. There must be supervision, with the police and other security personnel playing a role more akin to chaperone than overseer. It may also be useful to make youth events strictly youth events — ie limit or ban persons above the age of 18 for certain shows, as is automatically the case in school events, for example. Such measures may not solve the problem of delinquent behaviour at Carnival time, but they may help prevent worst-case scenarios.