Irresponsible parents a major factor in TT crime

A major factor in the crime wave hurting Trinidad today is as a direct result of the failure of all too many parents and/or guardians to spend quality time with their children, to be positive examples for them and seek to instil in them a feeling of self-worth and the ambition to be achievers. Instead, there are fathers who refuse to work honestly, do not bother to conceal their womanising as well as lives of banditry from their sons and daughters, become drunk, gamble, swear and use cocaine and other illegal substances in front of their children and their children’s friends.  In turn, they cannot be bothered to help their children with their homework, or because they were dropouts from school are not able to do this, then even to insist that their children do their homework. In turn, there are mothers who rather than encourage their offspring to study are content to have their school age sons rob homes and stores and bring home money for them, and for their daughters, who very often are still in school, to sleep around with men who pay for their uniforms, shoes and outfits and provide them with ample pocket change.

I do not believe that I tell tales out of school when I relate a disturbing incident of a few years ago when a group of us was invited to an educational institution to give talks on career guidance with particular emphasis on why we (the members of the group) had chosen our careers. When one of the group had finished speaking he issued a general invitation to members of the teenaged audience to come to the microphone and share with others what they wanted to be when down the road they graduated from school. Initially, there was a rush of children and then a reluctance on the part of others to come forward. He invited one of the youngsters to the microphone.  At first she appeared diffident, but he was able to persuade her. She stood up, her young face picturing shyness, and advised she would tell him but not for the other students to hear.  He granted her the concession and she walked up and whispered in his ear. He appeared puzzled by what she said and a gentle, almost sad shrug of his shoulders accompanied a reply inaudible to others in the room. Later, much later, he would tell the other members of the group, two of us, what she had said. Actually, it was not a statement of intent and an explanation of why a choice had been made, but rather a question.

What qualifications, she had asked him, would she or anyone else need to become a prostitute? She was a child, not yet 14, and with the face, the voice and sad expression of a child. I wish the reader to believe me when I say that I do not regard the teenaged girl’s question as an indictment of her, but rather of her parents, her environment and her equally misguided peers. While other girls her age may have seen, however tentatively, medicine or law or plumbing, or painting buildings or even being a URP worker as a viable option, her choice was prostitution! I can only guess at what may have prompted her choice, but I will not offer an opinion here. How many of the nation’s children have become bandits, or petty thieves, or smartmen/women or prostitutes because their fathers had been bandits etc, or their mothers hustlers, entertaining a succession of “uncles” for money and without regard for their children? Or how many wayward youths had strayed because, in the absence of proper parental guidance, they had yielded to peer pressure?

Yet all too often when armed young bandits are killed in shootouts with the Police, their mothers perhaps regretting not so much their deaths as much as their no longer being able to be relatively ample providers out of the proceeds of their criminal acts, cry out: “My son was a good boy. He had a good job. He was a good provider. Who will take care of me now?” But the question that needs to be asked is why did she and/or his father not take care of him from infancy, not simply with clothes and food, but with a proper upbringing and positive examples. No child is born delinquent. Rather he develops the negative traits that all too often lead to delinquency from a combination of factors, some of which may be parental neglect, irresponsible parenting, negative examples and negative group peer pressure.  It is his upbringing, or rather the lack of it, coupled with his parent’s (or parents’) lack of interest in his choice of friends that determines the path he chooses. I switch gears. Last week I wrote in this column about a girl from the Nelson Street Plannings, Jaresha Antonio, who lives with her grandmother,  Eleatha de Bourge, and who even though her marks in the SEA had been in the first 29 percent had been assigned to a Junior Secondary School, a three-year school.

I am happy to advise that on the day following the publication of my article Jaresha was transferred to the South East Port-of-Spain Secondary School, a seven-year school! The Adopt a Child Sub-Committee of the Community Service Committee of the Rotary Club of Central Port-of-Spain, which had originally provided her with books for the three-year school, arranged through its Chairman, Peter Aleong, to have the books returned to the book store, Ishmael M Khan and Sons Limited, from which they had been purchased, and for Jaresha Antonio to be provided with a new set of books. Peter Aleong had from early requested Jaresha not to write her name and/or address in any of the books until the question of a transfer or otherwise was determined and her compliance facilitated the exchange.  The Rotary Club of Central Port-of-Spain’s Adopt a Child Sub-Committee, which has been dealing with Ishmael M Khan and Sons, of Henry Street, Port-of-Spain, since the Sub-Committee was formed some ten years ago, this year acquired school books for nine children from lower income homes, including eight secondary school students and one primary school child.