Chief executive officer of Supreme Counselling for Personal Development, Shawn Clarke, is calling for open hearts and minds when reaching out to the youth.
The advocate said many of the country’s youth do not emerge from environments that instil positive values, making it imperative to meet them where they are and without judgement.
“Not all young people who get involved in violent situations, or who have angry outbursts, are bad young people. Some of them are just going through very bad spots, and they have never been taught how to deal with the situations. They have never been taught conflict resolution.
“We need to start listening to our young people to understand . . . where they are coming from, to understand what they are going through, and then to be able to put systems in place to work with these young people to curb whatever they’re going through,” he said.
One of the systems which the organisation is proposing is a suspension programme, wherein they accept students expelled or suspended from school and engage them in productive activities.
“I do not believe in suspension without intervention. I do not believe that you’re doing a child any favour by just sending him home for five or ten days unsupervised to get involved with the negative elements.
“In some cases, those children come back just as they went, and in other cases, they come back worse than they went.
“So I believe that there needs to be suspension programmes across the country that when children are sent home from school, that they are suspended in the care of an organisation that will have a programme in place to work with them for the reason they have been suspended, and to curb the number of suspensions that any one particular child would have,” he added.
However, Clarke said the programme was stalled due to lack of funding from Government, meaning that some youths were turned away from receiving crucial care.
“This week alone, I had a call from about six different schools, including principals wanting to send students over to us who have been suspended for a minimum of ten days.
“The reality and the hardship is that, because we are still awaiting funding from Government to be able to get that suspension programme up and running, it means that we have to be turning these young people,
who are in need of that kind of service, away,” he said.
The CEO made his remarks at the Reach One, Save One: Ignite The Change community outreach pop-up at Bush Hall Community Centre recently in Bush Hall, St Michael.
The outreach was one of several weekly initiatives where the organisation visited a community, offering a range of competitions centred on anger management, self-esteem building as well as free 15-minute psychologist consultations and discussions on strategies to curb community violence.
“We’re basically asking the participants to help us with ways that they believe can be implemented to curb violence within the Bush Hall and the other surrounding communities.
“We are looking at things like anger management. You have a child that is extremely angry. What is going on? Is it really anger, or is it that your child is sad? Is it that your child is lonely? Is it that your child is hungry? And so those are some of the things that we will be discussing today,” he said.
