AG – Parents must step up

This country’s chief lawmaker has chided parents who abdicate responsibility for what happens with their children in society, saying they are wrong to ignore the two-thirds control they have over their charges’ rearing time.

“Everybody has to hold some weight,” says, Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Dale Marshall as he responded to those who may question ‘what is government doing’ when it comes to wayward youths.

He said that while government is responsible for making sure that the machinery of the State works, and the education system and social services sectors are in place and that the financing and the expertise are available to capture those who might be “falling through the cracks” parents must hold up their side of the bargain as well.

“We put all these things in place but unless those parts of the society, the parents and so on, recognise that we are only part of the solution and that they make up the other two thirds of the day, then our resources would have gone to nothing,” he told the Lower House of Parliament on Tuesday.

“We still have a way to go,” he added as he outlined that at the end of January this year, there were 106 murder cases awaiting trial in local courts, eight cases of manslaughter and 254 firearm cases.

By the end of June, he added, 67 murder cases had been dealt with though he could not confirm how many of those were accounted for from January to June this year.

Updating the Parliament, AG Marshall said the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had provided figures that 1 600 matters were awaiting indictment. “Every day we’re adding, more people are charged,” he explained.

He said 50 per cent of the population of Dodds Prisons is made up of those on remand while the other half are convicts serving time for their crimes. This is at a time, he said, when there are fewer people in the jail overall.

“We have to be honest with ourselves. People call the police after the act has happened. Very few of them will ever call the police and say ‘I went in my son’s bedroom and I see a gun’; ‘In my house under a flooring board is some drugs’. They’re not going to say that there is some suspicious activity happening in the back yard and they feel that somebody is hiding things in there. They never call the police for that. They always call the police after it has happened and then they say ‘what the government doing’,” Marshall charged.

The attorney general said he agreed with a statement of theformer attorney general in the previous administration who said that government did not raise the children who get involved in criminal activity. Parents, he said, must take responsibility for their role.

“In the eyes of a child a parent is the first and most important minister.” (SBP)