A Discussion Site for Good Governance and Corruption in Public Life Issues in the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla in the West Indies, moderated by Don Mitchell CBE QC, of PO Box 83, Anguilla, British West Indies. Email me with your comments and contributions at: idmitch@anguillanet.com.
Corporal punishment in school: I find it regrettable that concern for very deserving human rights has now gone so far as to make it dangerous for the principals of our High Schools in the West Indies to order canings of delinquent students. A caning from time to time of the worst offenders in school has always had a very salutary effect on maintaining discipline. A couple of raps across the knuckles, or a belting across the bottom is just as salutary. I do not know about you, but I never suffered any harm to my body or soul from all the canings I got as a school child. So far as I can remember, I got six strokes from the pesi cane on my backside most Monday mornings for five years for refusing to play boring sports on weekends. The caning is meant less to modify behaviour than to teach a lesson. The caning did not make me want to play sports. It was not intended to convert me to be a sports lover. What I learned from my regular weekly canings was that there are consequences for breaking the rules. The caning merely said that if you disobey a direct order from the Sports Master, there are going to be painful consequences. If a child puts his hand in the fire on the stove he gets burned and never does it again. A valuable lesson for life is learned. Caning is a cheap, effective and instantaneous form of teaching. Today it is banned, and there is no effective suitable alternative available in school.
Nowadays, school children are taught, by the absence of pain and suffering for wrongdoing, that there are no consequences for breaking the rules. The result is chaos in schools and in society. We have to have police security at all our school gates to confiscate the knives and guns, and we have to send students to the hospital suffering from wounds and injuries. The child psychologists who have corrupted our education system in this way have a great deal to answer for. It is due to their teaching that so many of our students can hardly read and write and have no self-discipline.
I do not consider a caning in school of a delinquent schoolboy to be in breach of the child's human rights. Nor do I believe such a caning to be inhuman treatment. There are many worse things that happen to school children that they survive and move on from. This includes sexual abuse and drunken maltreatment by their fathers, uncles and brothers. Such home conditions affect a significant percentage of our school children, yet no one does anything about it. The perpetrators continue to attend church every Sunday and are accepted as prominent and distinguished members of our society.
I include, as an equally unacceptable form of child abuse, the fact that most of our Primary School children in Anguilla arrive in the High School unable to read or write.
This aversion to a healthy, harmless and effective form of corporal punishment is the most degenerate of the modern norms of European culture that we are being told we must emulate, or be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
A little girl played Il Silencio, and I thought I was hearing the sound of heaven. I have never heard such a young girl play a trumpet before. And to have heard it played so perfectly! And by a thirteen year old!
She held me spellbound. I hope she did you too. Her name is Melissa Vernema and she is playing with Maestro Andre Rieu in Maastricht in the Netherlands. City officials are said to have sealed off the town square and closed everything down to achieve perfect noise control.
The real point of this post is that it is quite wrong for us adults to assume that the youth of today are all wasters. I know one or two young Anguillians who put in a similar effort into their activities, and have the high degree of talent shown here. The question is how do we get more young people to strive to excel? The answer, it appears, is to expect more of them, to demand more, to never accept second grade. I know the child psychologists do not approve. It does not help with the late achievers and the slow starters. Well, I am sorry, accepting low scores from those who can do better is not good enough if we want to raise their standards.
Victor Frankl said it better than I ever can as far back as the year 1972.
I like the idea of always overestimating the abilities of my students. I like the idea of not accepting that they will not, cannot, achieve at the highest level. For the future, I want to see my students surprise all around them with how much they can learn, and how well they can express it when asked.
A propos of nothing, this is the best rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus that I have ever seen and heard. Sorry for those who don’t like their Handel being messed with.
My High School was at a Benedictine Monk monastery in Trinidad, but we would never have been able to do something as excellent as the Winter ParkHigh School did.
Yes, they vote too. Whenever I despair at the low level of education found today among our young Anguillians I look at this video. It refreshes me. It reminds me that there is still a long way to go before we hit rock bottom, as they have in other places.
If you ever had any doubt that the American century is over, the above video should have been conclusive. With citizens like the ones we have just seen, the twenty first century will clearly belong to the east. If you are still not sure about that, check this:
I read on one website recently that there will be substantially more Ph.D. engineers and scientists in China in 2010 than in the United States, as China produces three times the number of engineers per year. In 2001, only 5% of American 24 year olds with a bachelors degree were engineers, compared to 39% in China and 19% or more in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. R.E. Smalley, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist from RiceUniversity, recently concluded that by 2010 90% of all Ph.D. physical scientists and engineers in the world will be Asians living in Asia. And among Asian Ph.D. engineers and scientists, most will be produced by China.
Another website reports that each year, about 70,000 Americans receive undergraduate and graduate science and engineering degrees that are defence related, compared with a combined 200,000 in China and India.
Professor Richard Dawkins says it better than anyone I know. For the safety of the nation and the well-being of the children it is not sufficient for us to be merely atheists. It is necessary for us to be militant atheists. After all, we are all of us atheists to some extent. When you think of it, all good Christians have nothing but contempt and disdain for any belief in Ba'al, Thor and the Golden Calf. Some of us just choose to go one god further.
I have given the matter a lot of thought. There are said to be three known reasons why intelligent West Indian men went into the ministry. They are the usual ones: sex, money and power. All the good looking women, who were at the same time gullible, were to be found in church dressed in their Sunday best. They knelt down before you, emoting to your every word and gesture. Seducing them was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Additionally, with little or no learning, but an ability to talk good, one could make a fortune through a church. Just look at the fat, greasy tel-evangelists we see on the TV every day. And the power came from being in a position to influence people's lives. Jim Jones was one of the most successful at all of these church-centered activities. He was one of the few who came to a sticky end.
It is different today. Our young men of the 21st century can go into politics, business and the professions without any restriction at all. Fifty years and more ago, the options for a bright young black man were more limited. Race prejudice excluded them from most of the more reputable outlets for self improvement. There were few other opportunities to better yourself than the church.
That is one reason why elderly West Indian church leaders still among us seem to have been all scholarship material. We look at them perform and listen to them preach and wonder why they had to waste their brains on such a mindless occupation as preaching superstitious nonsense to their followers.
It is different with the younger generation of preachers and ministers today, I have to shake my head at how unsophisticated and uneducated many of them are. And, so mindlessly and perversely cruel.
I have never heard an evolutionist condemn a church-goer to everlasting hell. No palaeontologist to my knowledge has ever cut off anybody's head for not accepting that the dinosaurs were made extinct by an asteroid colliding with the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago.
In conversation with a group of students at the local AnguillianHigh School recently, the subject of evolution came up. One student asked me if I believed in the “theory of evolution”. I answered that the evolution of new species is no longer classed as a theory: it is a recognised fact. Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the engine that drives evolution may be described as a theory, but not the fact of evolution itself. This response was met by a sea of disbelieving faces. Disconcerted, I asked the youngsters how many of them believed that evolution was a false theory. Every one of them nodded his or her head in agreement with the assertion. Not a single student declared confidence in the science of evolution. These were senior students, mind you, about to graduate from High School. They were not small and untutored children from a junior school. To say that I was shocked would not be sufficient. I was stunned. Could it be, I asked myself, that our education system in Anguilla is teaching the discredited theory of creationism as if it were science?
I was educated in a religious school in Trinidad in the 1950s and 1960s. My biology teacher was a priest and minister of religion. He taught us then that the evolution of species was an accepted fact. We learned that the story of the creation, the Old Testament story of the Garden of Eden and God’s creation of all the known animals at the time of the beginning of the world, was meant to be taken as metaphor, not fact. We were taught as good Catholics that God had made man in his image. God had done this by breathing an immortal soul into him at some stage in the distant past when our physical bodies had evolved into homo sapiens. I have long ago rejected as fantasy the whole structure of the Judeo-Christian myths. I had not realized that anyone today still believed in the discredited Jewish creation story as science.
After the encounter, I enquired around. I checked the CXC website for the biology syllabus. I could not find it available on-line. It would appear you have to buy it. I checked two recent schools’ reports on the CXC exam results. Neither mentioned either of the words ‘evolution’ or ‘creationism’. I could not find out what the title of the recommended CXC biology text book was. I would love to check it to see what version of science it teaches. Maybe I can find out who the biology teacher is, and have a look at the recommended text-book.
I asked one educated mother who is a friend of mine whether she knew that the school was filling her daughter’s mind with superstitious nonsense instead of science. She smiled. She said, “No point fighting it, Don. It is the duty of every parent to give their children a proper grounding. All kinds of nonsense are taught in schools all around the world. We have to learn as we grow up what to reject and what to keep.” She probably gave me very sensible advice. But, I was not satisfied. What about the children of uneducated and unsophisticated parents? Are they not hoping that their children are being properly taught in school so that they can compete in the outside world of ideas? They know they cannot do it themselves. I came away with the realization that in Anguilla it must be generally accepted that the creation version of the origin of species may be taught in our school system as science.
I know what I would do if I had a child who was being taught in school that the earth is flat, that the earth is the centre of the universe, that the sun goes around the world each day, and that God created the earth on 23 October 4004 BC. These were all religious beliefs that were taught as science at one time by Christians in school. I would be very angry indeed.
Columbus
Columbus was warned by the religious leaders of his day that if he sailed westwards to the horizon, he would fall off the edge of the world. The Church taught that the Bible said that the earth was flat. Columbus ignored them and in 1492 sailed west to increase our knowledge.
Copernicus
Copernicus demonstrated in 1540 that the sun did not orbit the earth as taught by the church. He died before they could burn him at the stake, as he deserved for going against the Bible.
Galileo
Galileo was condemned and imprisoned for life in 1616 for showing that the earth was not the centre of the universe, as taught at the time by the Christian Church.
In the religiously conservative State of Tennessee in 1925, biology teacher John Scopes began teaching evolution to his students. This was contrary to a law passed by the state legislature. It was illegal to teach evolution in some States of the US. William Jennings Bryan, a conservative Christian fundamentalist, led the charge to ban the teaching of evolution in US schools. He joined the team prosecuting Scopes for the offence of teaching evolution. Clarence Darrow, a prominent freedom of speech advocate, joined the defence team. Scopes was found guilty, and fined $100.00. But the conviction was dismissed by the Supreme Court with the damming comment, “Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case”. Since that time the creationist theory of the origin of human life has not been taught in public schools anywhere in the civilized world. Except, it seems, in Anguilla.
Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan
The Book of Genesis is a religious tract written for credulous shepherds who lived three thousand years ago. It preserves the narcotic-induced ravings of the followers of a sociopathic god. The whole schema was discredited two thousand years ago by Jesus of Nazareth, who brought the New Testament to replace the earlier barbaric teachings of the Old Testament. Human knowledge has gone a long way since both these works were put together. Their teachings may be broadcast in church to terrify little children into submission, but they have no place in a science class in any school today.
What is the point of all this? It is this: Anguilla has over the past hundred years produced hundreds of scholars of the highest distinction, including in the sciences. We have produced neurosurgeons, engineers and technicians of every type. They must have been taught real science, not myth, to have got where they did. At some point between my sitting of O-level exams in 1964 and the CXC syllabus of today, the students of Anguilla appear to have begun to be indoctrinated in pseudo-religious beliefs that I thought had long ago been discredited. It is with regret that I conclude that, due to the ignorance taught by our science teachers, Anguillian students are now blocked from advancement in careers founded on science.
My fear is that we will no longer be able to produce a competent chemist, geologist, archaeologist, geneticist, or other hard scientist. This sad state of affairs will persist so long as we continue to teach our students ‘creation science’ and ‘intelligent design’, two warped and inaccurate versions of biology, the science of life.
Educated religious teachers no longer instruct children in idiotic pre-science beliefs. These have been so thoroughly discredited that I had mistakenly thought that only a nincompoop would teach them today.
ALHCS Debates. The student and staff members of the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School Literary and Debating Society have organized a series of debates among the political candidates in the upcoming general elections in Anguilla. The exercise is not only meant as a contribution to the discourse leading up to the elections, it is also a praise-worthy effort to raise much-needed funds for the members of the Society to pay their airfares and hotel expenses in attending the next Leeward Islands Debating Competition for High Schools. The timetable for the debates among the political candidates has been published for some time. The Anguillian Newspaper published a story on the topic in its issue of 29 December 2009.
The first debate was held yesterday. It was intended for the three candidates from the West End constituency to show what stuff they are made of. The participants were to be Wilmoth Hodge for the APP, Walcott Richardson for the AUM, and Kenswick Richardson for the now discredited AUF. Only Wilmoth Hodge turned up. The cowardly candidates of the other two parties failed to show up, leaving Wilmoth alone to field all the questions. He answered valiantly the multitude of issues put to him by the young members of the Debating Society. By all accounts, he acquitted himself well.
When our young people fail to meet our expectations, we are quick to jump all over them, none more so than me. When they do something worthwhile and creditable, they deserve all our encouragement and congratulations. Shame on you both, Walcott and Kenswick Richardson.
Other competing and contrasting views can be read here, and here.
The gossip around The Valley was about the demand of Viceroy to bring in 70-odd Nevisians to complete the staffing of their Anguilla hotel. Why Nevisians? you may ask. Because Four Seasons Hotel in neighbouring Nevis trained hundreds of locals to run a hotel to the highest standard. Four Seasons has been closed for a year. It closed down thanks to Hurricane Omar. As a result, there are hundreds of trained, unemployed hotel staff in Nevis. Just 100 miles away from Anguilla. What more obvious solution to the understaffed Viceroy Hotel than to bring the unemployed Nevisians to Anguilla?
The anticipated advantage for Viceroy was that they would be employing vulnerable, malleable immigrants. At the slightest sign of stroppiness, or independence of mind, these foreign workers could be cowed into submission by threatening them with deportation. That should keep them quiet!
The problem is that in Anguilla there are hundreds of young people who are out of a job. They are demanding to know what their government is doing to look out for them. Elections are around the corner. Government was anxious to oblige. The machinery of government was deployed in their defence. Is that so wrong?
All that we asked was for our Anguillian youth to present themselves to any prospective employer in a reasonable light. The problem is that the youth of Anguilla are unprepared for the job market. The average Anguillian out-of-school young lady is tattooed from wrist to armpit. She wears to the job-interview earrings that reach from her ears to her shoulders. No one has taught either her or her brother how to handle a job interview. Viewing the combination of her tattoos and earrings is guaranteed to frighten the s++t out of the average middle-aged, north-American guest at her hotel. This makes her virtually unemployable. Meanwhile, her brothers have lost the last trace of their parents’ Anguillian culture. The present-day youth of Anguilla have been educated by BET jail-talk. They speak a dialect, learned from US TV, that is closer to Folsum Jail prisoner-jargon than anything their Anguillian ancestors ever spoke. They are generally unmannerly, semi-literate, and unprepared for the job market. With their pants-waists dropping below their hips to reveal their dirty underpants, no employer, no matter how desperate, would ever imagine employing them. They are, all of them, just not ready for the job market. The average Anguillian High-School graduate is barely fit to be employed in the garden of a second-rate hotel, far less the front office of a Viceroy.
The joke of it all is on Viceroy. As part of the deal for getting all the tax exemptions they were given by our generous, outgoing government, Viceroy had promised to have the necessary staff trained in time for the opening of the hotel. They utterly failed themselves. They dropped the training promise. Such little training of Anguilllian staff as they provided, was perfunctory and last-minute. The accountants who now run the hotel had decided that the promised training of Anguillian staff would be too expensive. It would be cheaper to bring in Asians at one tenth the going West Indian rate. Our government encouraged them to believe this was feasible.
They did not factor in the general elections that come every five years, and the ensuing upsurge in ‘patriotism’. Sorry, it turns out that at this present time no imports are allowed. An election has to be won first.
I get really angry when I read an uninformed tourism promotion article about Anguilla. If you are a real Anguillian, visit this stupid article. In the breathless prose we expect from tourism industry advertising hacks, we are invited to “succumb to this island’s charms.” There follows all the usual rubbish about “crystal clear turquoise waters”.
Perhaps the most annoying part of the article is the nonsense about The People. Apparently, our island policies have resulted in a prosperous population in Anguilla with a good education system and a proud heritage. Yuck! Yuck! For those of us on the front line, the one thing you notice in our schools is how totally uneducated our school population is. There is no good education system “with a proud heritage” in Anguilla. Our graduating children can hardly read or write. That is a fact. As for the prosperous population, I have a few unemployed friends I would like to introduce you to.
The author blithely reports that there is only one criminal in Anguilla, and he has been caught. She writes that the last crime wave in Anguilla involved one young person who was responsible for a few break-ins and minor thefts that were a challenge to the island’s reputation. His arrest, and the community’s disapproval, served as a lesson to anyone with similar intent. Please, I want to puke! Who fed this author on free meals and drinks?
This would be embarrassing if it was written by a blogger. But it was published by Macleans. This is the Time Magazine of Canada. It is embarrassing and unprofessional, and the author does not spel so good either!
The only thing that makes sense in the article is the advice that “if you don’t arrive on your own yacht or your own jet, you’ll have to travel via St Maarten”. I can only conclude that Donna must be doing a great job of promoting our subsidized, very expensive, alternative transportation to Anguilla.
Does the St James School of Medicine of Bonaire really have a second campus in Anguilla? That is what prospective students have been emailing me to find out. Do we have a School of Medicine in Anguilla that no one knows about? There have been rumours, I tell them, but there is no trace of a place of medical education in Anguilla.
I am sure everyone remembers what the Minister of Finance said during the last Budget Address:
Finally, Mr Speaker, I am happy to say that the St. James Medical School, which Government granted approval by way of a Memorandum of Agreement in 2005, has received provisional accreditation from the regional body and is currently awaiting licensing. It is due to begin matriculating students in Anguilla next year. The MedicalSchool will initially operate out of rented premises but within 3-5 years, as per the terms of the MOA, will construct its own purpose built state of the art campus facilities. Mr Speaker we have high hopes for the St. James Medical School. The students at the St. James Medical School, which is expected to grow to some 250 persons overtime, will be a boon to the local apartment rental market as well as provide other benefits to the Anguillian economy.
We have been patiently waiting to see what develops with this promised medical school. We all want to know who is to be the favoured party supporter in whose direction the contracts will be steered.
Then, one of our local rental agents this week got a request from an individual looking for an apartment to rent in The Quarter because “… I will be attending the Saint James School of Medicine in January”. This alerted me that something may be happening. So, I decided to go to the website of the St James School of Medicine to see what I could learn.
Sure enough, there is now a whole section for their campus here in Anguilla. That is very new. It was not there the last time I looked.
There is even a picture of the school building.
…complete with a big sign on the front and logos on the door – even cars parked in front of it!
Look familiar?
Well, here’s the same building as it looks today…
…located on the curve in the main road in The Quarter in front of Babrow’s.
But wait – the building appears from the outside to be empty and unfurnished. Where are the sign and the logos on the door that we see in the photograph above? And the same car is parked in the same place! Someone, maybe, doing a little work with Photoshop? Making an empty building look like one that is in use?
A discussion on one of the online forums asks if the school is moving from Bonaire to Anguilla? The response:
Saint James is not moving it's [sic] campus from Bonaire to Anguilla. The school had to open a 2nd campus in order to meet accreditation requirements. They has [sic] to have a back up campus in case of an emergency or natural disaster. The new campus on Anguilla is starting it's [sic] first class of students for the Spring of 2010 and the Campus on Bonaire will continue to be on Bonaire.
It is pointless to speculate, as some have, that this could be just a “phantom campus” with a PO Box, to meet accreditation requirements.
One other speculation is that the Premedical Program will NOT be offered in Anguilla – just the Basic Science Program and the Clinical Science Program. So, this means it could be just classroom work – or it might be devoted to remote learning via computer.
What is more factual and interesting is that tuition for the 4-year Basic Science Program taken in Anguilla is almost 1½ times the cost of the same program if enrolled in Bonaire - US $26,000 in Anguilla vs. $18,000 in Bonaire, with housing expenses shown being $800/month here vs. $500 in Bonaire.
So this raises the question: if you are a student, why would you enroll in the school here in Anguilla – right now just an empty building – when for much less money, you can attend the large, well attended, well equipped campus in Bonaire and take the same courses?
You may recall the post I did about this medical school in June. The regional body that gives accreditation to medical schools is the Caribbean Accreditation Authority for Education in Medicine and other Health Professions (CAAM-HP). I reported then that they had given provisional approval for the Anguilla Campus of the St James School of Medicine. One of the conditions of this provisional accreditation was that the St James School was obliged to put a warning in all their promotional material in words to the effect that accreditation of the Anguilla campus was only provisional. That was to alert students not to make a financial commitment to a campus that did not yet exist. As they worded their decision:
I am certain the St James School would have done just that and not misled students. Clearly, they cannot open their doors to students until they get final approval. So, I visited the CAAM-HP website to check on the current state of the approval. This is what I found.
So, as per the CAAM-HP website above, the St James School of Medicine is not yet accredited to teach in Anguilla. That decision is still "to be announced". No doubt, everything will be cleared up before they start taking any money from any students who think they are coming to an accredited school of medicine in Anguilla in January.
Let’s hope there are no games being played here that could possibly embarrass Anguilla in any way.
The Anguilla Comprehensive Education Report is Published. Perhaps it has been on the news. Perhaps it has not. I have not heard anything about it. It was purely by chance that I opened the government website. There it was, a link to the long-awaited Report on Comprehensive Education in Anguilla.
8. The Review Team has been advised that there is a weekly press conference where the Chief Minister and other Ministers address issues and respond to questions. There is rarely any talk about education. It is recommended that ‘education’ should be a weekly part of this press conference. Either the Minister of Education or a “Guest Speaker” (e.g. the Permanent Secretary) can make some comments and answer questions from the Press. This would enhance Public Relations. It will keep education in people’s minds.
It would certainly make the Chief Minister’s weekly press conference have a bit of substance, instead of the nonsense about “arranged marriages” that we have had to put up with the past few weeks.
Then, at page 69 I found this interesting bit of data:
Table 6.1: Investment in Education as a % of GDP 1996-2008
I confess to inadequacies in maths. Do those figures not say that we are spending a smaller and smaller percentage of GDP, and of the total budget, on education? Does that fact not suggest that the education of Anguilla’s children is considered to be of decreasing importance?
On balance, I consider the Report to be a bland and boring piece of bureaucratese. What few recommendations for improvement of the education system it contains are well hidden among a mass of detail and trivia, quotations and observations. I forecast that few will read them, and none of the recommendations will be implemented.
I was particularly disappointed by the inadequacies and incompleteness of Section 3, “Observations on the Comprehensive Education System in Anguilla.” Reading the Report one gathers that all-in-all the system is working quite well!
Either that, or the team agreed to cut out a lot of recommendations that someone considered objectionable. I am speculating, but that could be the cause of such a noticeable hole in the middle of the Report.
How many doctors, plumbers, carpenters, teachers and lawyers have this type of
bogus qualification? I keep getting this unsolicited e-mail in my in box. LIME must have changed their settings. Normally, their filters remove such obvious invitations to fraud from the server long before Outlook Express downloads them to my computer.
I have been patiently deleting the messages. But, they are getting more frequent, and annoying. The last one read:
BECAUSE YOU DESERVE IT!
Is your lack of a degree holding you back from career advancement?
Are you having difficulty finding employment in your field of interest because you don’t have the paper to back it up – even though you are qualified?
If you are looking for a fast and effective solution, we can help!
Call us right now for your customized diploma: Inside U.SA.: 1-718-989-5746 Outside U.S.A.: +1-718-989-5746.
Just leave your NAME & TEL. PHONE # (with country-code) on the voicemail and one of our staff members will get back to you promptly!
You have got to wonder. How many frustrated, ambitious but unqualified, persons fall victim to this fraudulent invitation. It sounds so clean and above board. The reality is just the opposite. It is an invitation for the unqualified to put money into these tricksters’ pockets. In exchange for the fee you get a bogus degree to add to your name. The hope is that you might be able to fool your employer into accepting, and paying you a higher salary than you would otherwise be entitled. In the USA or Europe there are agencies we can use to quickly find out who has a real qualification from who has gone to one of these diploma mills for a worthless certificate.
But, here in the West Indies who is our consumer watchdog? Who is our standard setter?
We do not even measure the amount of gasoline coming out of the pumps. Never in the history of Anguilla has any shop’s scales been tested by the non-existent Weights and Measures Officer.
There is no one, of course. Take no qualifications at their face value. You better check everything for yourself. There is no one you can rely on to do it for you.
Meanwhile, I have taken my own steps to block this unwanted invitation from showing up in my in box again.
Why parents must be held more accountable and responsible.I was talking to the unmarried father of an 8 year old boy recently.He has a problem with the mother of his child.Every time he brings the child back to the mother after he has spent the weekend with him, the mother locks the child out of the house.She refuses to let him back in the house until he cries and begs to her satisfaction.She screams abuse at the child constantly.He has tried to get the Department of Social Development to help him, but there is nothing they can do under our present legal system.There is nothing the police or the court can do.There is no legal remedy.The mother has all the ‘rights’ and the father only has ‘obligations’.His concern is that the lack of love and affection is going to turn his child into a criminal one of these days.He is so right.
The present serious juvenile crime situation in Anguilla is a social phenomenon, not entirely susceptible to legal solutions. Only the parents can solve the nub or nut of the problem.The sad thing is that so many of our parents are themselves the product of broken and abusive homes. All they can do is to repeat the cycle of domestic abuse and neglect.It is human nature to do so. It is also an aspect of culture and education. When so many mothers and fathers have been educated to bring up anti-social children, why are we surprised when they so often succeed?
That is why some social reformers advocate holding parents responsible.We need to put more pressure on parents to perform their parenting role. It should be backed up with educational programmes on how to be a good father and good mother. It always amazes me how many parents do not begin to understand how destructive their example and behaviour is. Then, when we point the finger at them, they respond by saying it is unfair.No, it is not unfair.
If a mother or father persistently permits their child to be a truant from school, that ought to be a crime on the part of the parent.
If a mother or father persistently permits their child to mix with gangsters, that ought to be a crime on the part of the parent.
If a mother or father persistently permits their child to bear arms and offensive weapons in the home, that ought to be a crime on the part of the parent.
The object is not to punish the parent. The object is to convince the parent that he or she needs to do more to monitor and supervise the behaviour and acquaintances of their child.
The result will not be a flooding of our jail with delinquent parents. The Magistrate will make an example of one or two, and suddenly attitudes will change.
It is not the fine or the jail that is the wake up call. It is being brought before the court and named and shamed that is the effective part of prosecuting a social crime.We have to face reality as a society and take active steps to break the cycle of child abuse and negligent parenting.
Of course, if we were rich like the Americans or the British, we could try doing like them and throwing lots of money at the problem. I don't see that working for them, and we certainly can’t make that a solution here.
Just my thoughts, while I thank God every day that I am not a parent myself.
