Hands-on training ‘vital’ in tackling youth violence, says education official

Hands-on training and updated education approaches must be central to the national response to youth violence and delinquency, a senior education official suggested on Friday, warning that prevention rather than policing holds the key to addressing the island’s growing crisis.

“The statistics are not just numbers. They represent young ladies derailed and communities that are, in some instances, living in fear,” Dr Roderick Rudder, director of tertiary education in the Ministry of Training and Tertiary Education, told a “Village Builders” breakfast meeting with faith-based leaders and a Cabinet minister at the UWI School of Business.

“We know that the solution does not lie solely in law enforcement. It lies in prevention, and that prevention begins with the dedicated community volunteers and activists and leaders who we deem to be our village builders, who are on the front lines every single day.”

He noted the changing behaviours of young people and the challenges of engaging them in traditional spaces. “Our young people would go to church, and Sunday school and to the youth groups and so on, and that social gathering formed the basis of helping to mould our young people,” he said.

“The old Sunday school approach has to [therefore] be revisited. We now have to capture the imagination and interests of our young people who have a very short attention span.”

Dr Rudder outlined a five-pillar strategy to address these challenges in a holistic way. “Our first strategy is to implement what I consider to be a five-pillar holistic approach to training. We must move beyond fragmented interventions and train our volunteers to address a whole child, and that means looking at your social, emotional, spiritual, behavioural and conflict resolution challenges that they will confront,” he shared.

He acknowledged that some of the behavioural issues on display often reflect deeper emotional trauma, noting, “A young person struggling with violence in the neighbourhoods, in the schools, is not just exhibiting a behavioural problem. They’re often grappling with deep-seated emotional trauma, a lack of social connection and a spiritual void, a lack of purpose and hope. Our training must therefore be comprehensive.”

Stressing the importance of fostering emotional intelligence in volunteers to help young people manage their feelings, Dr Rudder said, “They must be trained in restorative justice and conflict resolution frameworks that teach de-escalation and peaceful negotiation, trying to work things out before they get out of hand, thereby replacing aggression [and] violence with dialogue, talking it out, reasoning it out with one another and critically, they must be equipped to nurture the spiritual dimension.”

“We’ve seen the erosion of that spiritual dimension in our society, based on the low numbers of our young people who are not attending church.”

This holistic training ensures that volunteers are not just treating symptoms but dealing with the root causes of violence, the education official suggested.

“I want to suggest that we focus our attention on experiential and modern training delivery. This means adopting the successful principles of using play-based and project-based learning, which is being promoted even now across our schools. But we have to focus also on a collaborative ecosystem and continued support for our young people,” he said.

“Therefore, new volunteers need to be paired with seasoned activists, experienced trainers to ensure that we are able to share knowledge to successfully navigate these challenging times that confront us, and therefore, the crisis of youth violence demands a sophisticated strategic response.”

The minister for crime prevention, Kirk Humphrey, underscored the importance of faith-based organisations in crime prevention and social work: “Within our policy framework, we recognise that we could not do this without faith-based organisations, that there is still a lot of what is happening, I strongly believe, that is occurring in the unseen, and that this nation still needs prayer, and that this nation still needs a church body that is actively involved in the things that you need to get involved in.”

“We have a long-term objective to be able to help build strong children and repair those who have probably been a little bit wounded. So we adopted the philosophy… that said to us that the country’s youth have a crisis of meaning and purpose, that even though — and it’s not all of them in the same way — but I’m saying to you that it is a lot of our youth,” Humphrey said.

“The children of Barbados are not lost, all of them are not lost.” (LG)