Prime Minister Mia Mottley has called for the creation of community-based parenting clubs and a national support hotline, warning that Barbados risks losing young people to an emerging gang culture unless families and communities act decisively.
Noting that gang culture has introduced a level of organised crime into the landscape that must not be tolerated, Mottley, who is also the minister of national security, said that the problem, while not as severe as in other parts of the region, was not one for the government alone to address.
She told House of Assembly that lawmakers and right-thinking Barbadians ought to coordinate parenting clubs and to create spaces for reasoning.
“We make assumptions that people in every family know what is right and wrong in terms of raising children. We make assumptions that families may not recognize what is necessary to give firm love and believe that love is saying yes all of the time. We make assumptions that people should know that children at eight and nine and ten and 12 and 13 should not be on the street at night walking about, gambling, or playing games.
“We make assumptions that everybody knows how to raise children, and when those assumptions are made and coupled with the reality of the changes in our demographic structure, our housing patterns, the removal of the extended family, the removal of the concept of ‘Love thy neighbour’, share pot, or call it whatever you want, when you have the individual household being the totality of that child’s existence without the guidance coming from the extended family or the neighbours in the community, we make assumptions that come to haunt us as we are seeing now,” she said.
In the debate on the Criminal Gangs (Prevention and Control) Bill, the prime minister also said that, until these were up and running, a hotline should be established to help parents manage difficult children.
She also expressed hope that the legislation would provide an exit strategy for those who become involved in gangs and later seek a way out.
“It cannot be that we leave our children to be locked into a group of people who now take control of them and who, as this legislation recognizes, will put everything in their way to prevent them from leaving, even when they realise they made a wrong step and they really want to get out. That’s what we are trying to fight against here, and I say to you that many young persons will realise that they can get in easy, and then discover that leaving ain’t so easy. Leaving is in fact dangerous — that you’re going to face fear, that you’re going to have threats, that you’re going to face shame, that money gone, that retaliation is part of the order of the day, that pressure will be put on you to keep you trapped, so that this legislation hopefully will give us an exit strategy.”
She also highlighted the $5m special grant fund facility for registered faith-based organisations to deliver youth-focused community programmes, saying these entities will help in the raising of children.
Stressing that no person should have to choose between the protection of their family and telling the truth, Mottley said that families and communities must confront some “hard truths”.
“There sometimes is that one person in the family who will not listen and sometimes you need tough love to be able to get that person to be dealt with. Why? Because the grandmother deserves to be able to sit on the step, if she wants to. She deserves to be out there getting little breeze if she wants to get breeze. The shopkeeper must be able to ply their trade without fearing that if ‘I got a karaoke here somebody can come and spray away bullets and therefore people ain’t coming and I ain’t earning money no more’. These are the things that we are fighting for in here, and we must work to ensure that the code of silence that is built on fear is addressed by us, and that the law must make it expensive and impossible for the gang to be able to survive.”
Pointing out that the country had recorded yet another murder hours earlier, the prime minister said that the country would not be surrendered “to an insidious culture that has no place in our jurisdiction”.
(JB)
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