BOOT CAMP. National service. Scare the youth straight (take them on visits to the prison).
Lecture them into the straight and narrow (feed them talk from an assortment of citizens, ex-convicts and former gang members who “found Jesus”). Provide counselling for teens who are listening to other voices while on the “couch”.
That should significantly reduce perturbing social waywardness, they think. Yuh think?
Yuh think these things can match up to the troubling problems we face?
Of course, we have to do something. Beyond Government masterminding the fixing of “broken windows” (see last week’s Broken Windows, Lax Government), a society should utilize other interventions to keep social misbehaviour below an untenable threshold.
Although some of the worst public behaviour I see these days is from hard-back men and women, any effort to change the future must seriously and broadly engage the youth, especially the at-risk ones.
Now, I really believe the methods mentioned above – some of which are straight out of our authoritarian and obeah playbooks – do transformationally impact a few people. Those who have epiphanies (lightning bolt moments of realization) and those who are fervently in pursuit of change of self have genuine turnarounds.
But since you are aiming to catch more than a chance few, you want to use means that have reach and a proven track record.
Unfortunately, many of society’s interventions have been driven not by proof of significant success, but by unexamined intuition and less than reliable anecdotal testimonials.
Boot camps and scared straight approaches major on “fear-and-force” external motivation in a context that the youngsters will leave – and do nothing to build up the internal motivation they will require to fly right.
Juvenile facilities
And some doubt has been thrown on the efficacy of juvenile facilities in which you put the at-risk together.
Summarizing a number of studies, including the important When Interventions Harm: Peer Groups And Problem Behavior (Dishion, McCord and Poulin 1999), Timothy Wilson concludes: “If you want at-risk teens to act out and become even more deviant . . . one of the best things you can do is to arrange for them to hang out together on a regular basis.” (Redirect: The New Science Of Psychological Change)
So you can see how our hierarchical secondary school system is a contributor to social indiscipline.
Bajans should also tank their almost thoroughgoing belief in talk as an accomplisher of change – what I call a belief in obeah. If there is a problem, the average Barbadian comes up with “We must tell . . . ”. “Parents have to tell their children . . .”
As we seek to push back the tide of troubling behaviours in our society, we must scale back our confidence in direct verbal persuasion.
“If people routinely enact behaviours that are difficult to change, you can bet that they’ve heard more than one soliloquy on what’s wrong with them – and to no effect . . . If the behaviour you’re attempting to get the other person to change is personally rewarding . . . [they] will be particularly creative in coming up with arguments that support their existing view.” (Influencer – Patterson, et al)
Neither the talk nor the heavy-handed programmes change people’s own narrative – their self-view, their interpretation of themselves – and they don’t create a sense of autonomy or healthy connection with adults and peers or provide the experientializing of a process to a societally acceptable outcome.
A far more practical approach is the involvement of teens in volunteer work. It has been found to help them to avoid early sex, teen pregnancy, low commitment to education and other undesirable outcomes.
(I know we have various school groups that have some kind of volunteer component. These are, however, not broad-based school engagements and they do not have community service as their intense focus or, indeed, their raison d’être.)
I mean a carefully established broad-reach (across, say, Forms 3 to 6) undertaking of community service – along the lines of Teen Outreach and Reach For Health Community Youth Service, in which many high school students in the United States participate, with proven success.
Volunteer activity
In this kind of programme, students engage in a certain number of hours (for example, one to three hours a week) of supervised volunteer activity – at senior citizens homes, hospitals, clinics, day care centres, homeless shelters, soup kitchens (our equivalent would be the Salvation Army’s efforts and others), fund-raising activities, peer tutoring, visiting shut-ins, and so on.
Among other things, this programme is a working out of the do good, be good principle (the idea that one of the best ways to change someone’s self-view is to change their behaviour first, in this case nurturing the idea that they are valuable members of the society who have critical roles to play), which engenders an inclination to perpetuate the new behaviour and avoid other inappropriate activities.
So: positive, empowering, narrative-changing – volunteer work. A pathway of hope for the youth – and the society.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email [email protected].
