THE EDITOR, Sir:TAKING ACTION first begins with taking responsibility. We must step up and take responsibility for the children - for all children.
By living in a neighbourhood with children, we share the responsibility for the community parenting of those children. As adults, we can no longer allow our fear or apathy to keep us from reaching out. Taking responsibility means we stop ignoring the noise when children shout at each other, "Me a go kill you." We stop ignoring the raised voices and bruises from next door.
We stop ignoring the schoolyard bully. And we stop ignoring the mounting evidence of our own ignorance of our teenagers' thoughts and attitudes. When we know a child is being beaten, when we hear that a child has a weapon in a bag, when we know that a youth is vandalising a neighbourhood or bullying other children, we have a responsibility to tell authorities, and keep telling them until they act.
We also take responsibility by putting the needs of our youth at the top of the agenda. We must analyse each proposed policy or programme for the potential impact on children and youth. We must have the courage to deny policies or programmes if their impact is determined to be detrimental to the lives of youth.
Second, we must be willing to put our money where our mouths are. We know what works, what doesn't and what's promising in the field of prevention. Researchers have identified more than a dozen community, school, family, and youth-risk factors that contribute to juvenile violence. We must simultaneously reduce risk factors and increase protective factors for youth in their communities, schools, and families. We must become willing to invest as much money in building safe, literate, productive and lawful youth as we are willing to spend in trying to repair broken ones.
Third, we never give up. We never give up on youth even if they commit crimes, even if they commit violent acts, even if they refuse our help. We must commit to surrounding the offenders with effective rehabilitative services and to focus preventive efforts on such children. There is so much to be done to save our children and communities from horrors. We all need to pay attention to our youth and to ask them questions about their thoughts, their attitudes, and their actions. As adults, we must shoulder the responsibility to stop the violence.
As a society we have tended to think of these delinquents as a different breed, appalled by their actions but mostly content to segregate them from society rather then address the factors that produce them in the first place. Motivated by alienation, rage and feelings of justification, the impulse to kill is further reinforced by society's casual response to killing as a concept.
There have always been angry, alienated teenagers. But now we live in a culture that glorifies violence and provides these youth with easy access to fatal weapons. Guns are power to those who believe they have been deprived status or control over what happens to them. Too often our response to these alienated youth has been to marginalise them even further. Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions even for something as desperately in need of immediate answers as the violence in our country. The long-term solution is for communities to accept responsibility for all their children. Yes, parents must be more involved with their children and pay attention to their thoughts and feelings as well as their actions. So must teachers, neighbours, business and civic leaders.
Finally, we must eliminate the hypocrisy and mixed messages of a society that, in the same television hour, mourns the senseless tragedy that occurs daily and advertises the latest violent-action movie coming to the local cinema.
I am etc.,
TABITHA SERVICE
gener123@msn.com
Prairie View
Texas
USA
Via Go-Jamaica
