IT’S A TROUBLING trend everywhere.
It is youth violence.
“If a 19- or 20-year-old is at the point where he sees nothing wrong in taking a life, something is wrong,” warned West Indies Anglican Archbishop John Holder who is also Bishop of the Barbados Diocese.
“We have too many young people who are resorting to violence to solve a problem or to deal with a problem with someone else,” complained the archbishop in a recent conversation in Panama where senior members of the clergy and laity in the Caribbean and Latin America met to chart a course for the region’s influential church.
“That’s what I am worried, about – the youth violence. We have too many young men involved in violence and they are wasting their lives,” he said.
“Switch on the evening television news, pick up the daily paper or click on the Internet news services in and out of Barbados and the Caribbean, and the evidence hits you between the eyes. The latest shootings, murders, robberies, assaults, stabbings and other acts of violence are there.
“How come? Who is responsible: the home, schools, media or the church?
“You know, the church is always the fall guy,” asserted the archbishop. “Whenever things go wrong in the society, it is always the church, the government, the school. The schools get a lot of flogging for the ills of the youth.”
What was often ignored, he said, was that “we have the youth in the church for two, three or four hours a week and we try to do our best to get them on the straight and narrow. But the reality is that the young people are in the home much longer than they are in the church and the schools. You try your best in the two institutions to guide them along the way. But within the first minute in the home all of the moral things you try to teach them in the schools and the church disappear”.
The cleric traces a major source of the problem to what he calls the environment in the home which he said was not of the type where the young people find it (always) easy to be good. He said there were too many negatives pulling them away from the good and the righteous way.
Interestingly, Holder defines the church as a mix of Anglicans, Methodists, Moravians, Catholics, Evangelicals, Baptists, Pentecostals, you name them, and they are all doing their best.
“They are working overtime all across the spectrum of Barbados,” he said. “But we are working knowing there are powerful influences, and a lot of them are in the home, . . . not giving the youths the kind of moral influence that they should.”
Does the burden fall squarely on mothers and fathers? Not at all.
“We have good parents and some not so good parents,” noted the archbishop. “If you deal with a lot of young people and interact with them you know the issues they display didn’t fall from the sky. They are in the home environment. That’s where it is. Parents too will tell you that they are trying their best along with the church but the influences, sometimes come from the peers of the young people and they are overwhelming. We know a lot of times the issues are home issues.”
Then there are the media – print, electronic and Internet organisations?
Holder contends they have a responsibility to inform the public, and that’s what they try to do. But what was often lacking was the right balance when it came to the youth.
“All around the world, not simply in Barbados, crime and the youth are a hot topic, a front page topic,” said Holder. “But very often there is a lack of balance between things that go wrong and those that go right. You can find a lot of good stories about what young people are doing. But what we often see is an emphasis on the negative. There is a need for balance.”
He thinks the youth must help provide their peers with examples of good behaviour and they can use the social media to help do it, a point that was made at a recent gathering of young people in Grenada. They too have a role in finding solutions.
“I pray that the young people would be guided along the way that is righteous, pure and safe,” he said.
Tony Best is the NATION’s North American Correspondent. Email Bestra@aol.com
