A raft of community-based programmes will be launched next week to help steer the nation’s youth away from crime and other lawless activity, Minister of State in the Office of the Attorney General with responsibility for Crime Prevention Corey Lane disclosed on Friday.
He said now that funding is available after a few hiccups, the public can look forward to Elevate the Peace, a national parenting programme, the Live Wise Media Campaign and the National Jockey Academy, among others.
“I don’t even know how we’re going to keep up, but I know we will. We have Elevate the Peace that’s coming out where we’re going in all 11 parishes – two communities in each parish, where the change agents will be doing a number of direct intervention clubs,” he explained.
“There are too many unattached youth in unstructured programmes in Barbados and the devil finds work for idle hands. These are the ones that are not in Boy Scouts, not in church, not in piano lessons, not in swimming lessons, but they are on the blocks and they are finding a lot of nefarious and negative things to do.”
Lane said participants would be able to engage in fun, challenging, adventurous activities, including fishing, and hiking. The youth will also have to attend personal development programmes like Higher Heights and Flip the Script.
Lane said he was particularly happy with the pending rollout of a national parenting programme across all parishes.
“It’s gonna be online, it’s gonna be on radio, it’s gonna be in person. It is going to be massive, it is going to be good and it’s not being done by us alone; it’s being done with organisations like PAREDOS which has been doing this for over 50 years, MENS [Men’s Empowerment Network Support], the Social Workers Association, people with experience, and they are finally for the first time being given the resources to do the programme in a big way. So I’m very, very excited about that,” the minister said.
Youth will also be targeted to join the National Jockey Academy and Live Wise Media Campaign aimed at encouraging youth to make wise choices.
“It has nine different series of programmes with mini web series and so on which talk about the consequences of crime. Working in the prison, one of the things I recognised is that people don’t understand the true consequences of crime until they get into prison. They only know about losing their freedom. They don’t think about losing loved ones, the pain it has on the mother and grandmother to have the mortgage, the house, or sell the house to pay the lawyer…. They don’t know about all the other consequences,” he said. “This programme, by giving you a sneak peek, is actually going to let you speak to a number of survivors. It is gonna let you speak to a number of persons who have turned their life around .”
Earlier this week, the ministry launched in St Joseph, the Love and Unity T20 series which has had successful outcomes in other communities.
“We started with Love and Unity in the New Orleans that went beyond measure and then we had the other One Love that was done in the Bank Hall area, where we had, in one night, 6 000 patrons coming from all communities. Not one single incident of violence… and now we’re up in St Joseph because we plan to take this programme from the north to the south, to the east, to the west and central areas across Barbados,” Lane explained.
The programme will next be launched in St Lucy and St Peter.
Questioned on whether the ministry’s programmes were having a significant impact on crime, Lane reiterated that he would let the public be the judge, pointing to statistics.
“You can look at the numbers and see that over the years, you were averaging in the 40s in homicides and you would have noticed that we were doing about 15 in every 100 000 – that’s how it is measured globally in terms of the homicide rate. You will see that at the end of last year… we were at 21 murders, which puts us at seven in every 100 000. So, for me, I don’t want to give the analysis, I would like for people to look at the numbers and judge for themselves,” he said.
(SD)
