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The Bloody Drumbeat Of Crime and A Young Sovereign Bahamas
Related to country: Bahamas

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This Independence Day, Bahamas:
Bahama Journal Editorial -
Nassau, Bahamas:



Even as our people celebrate Independence, they are being obliged to note and understand that the popular tourist myth of their country and the wider Caribbean as a string of island paradises is being undermined by the realities of crime.

Today it is a fact that even some of the smaller and more remote communities in the region have experienced some spillover effects of escalating crime rates.

As some observers have noted, much of this escalation has occurred since the late 1980's and is a direct result of the large volume of drugs transiting the region and the increasing number of guns finding their way into most states.

But we dare say there are other contributing factors.

With relatively high rates of unemployment and underemployment, increasing income inequality, and the progressive marginalization of males who fail to meet prescribed standards of education, it is small wonder that a predatory class of young men has emerged.

In practically every instance, these young predators are aided and abetted by an equally feral gaggle of females.

It is these groups that are disproportionately responsible for the increases in violent and property related offenses and that has driven fear into the hearts of the citizenry.

As we get set to celebrate this country’s thirty-fifth birthday as a sovereign nation, we would all do well to take note that all is not well in today’s Bahamas.

This nation’s security and integrity continue to be undermined by home-grown gangsters and this country of ours is today in the throes of a major crime surge.

Sadly, practically no day passes when there is not some reference or the other to the number of people who have been raped, robbed, murdered or somehow or the other left to suffer in a mire of wretchedness.

Making the matter worse is that there are so very many Bahamians for whom this way of life is seen to be the norm; this being so because these young Bahamians have not ever known any other kind of social existence.

For far too many of them, the law of the jungle is taken to be the way that things are supposed to be. This might explain how there is such a strident call for this or that law to be amended so as to make it easier for the State to sanction and somehow sanctify capital punishment.

Regardless of the existence of this or that draconian penalty, drastic penalty is never really any panacea for ills that are – canker – like- deeply embedded in a deeply corrupted social order.

The causes and therefore social roots of this phenomenon just happen to be fairly well-known. As the record would show, the causes and progress of the country's social breakdown have been fully documented over the past 20-odd years by a series of special reports.

They were produced by the 1984 commission of inquiry into drug smuggling and the task force on drug abuse, the 1994 task force on education and the consultative committee on youth development, and the 1998 national crime commission.

What did that last report conclude? Well, the commissioners (a judge, a psychiatrist, a criminologist, social workers and clergymen) warned that Bahamian society was threatened by "a pervasive culture of dishonesty, greed and a casual disregard for social norms and regulation."

Four years earlier, the education task force had pointed to a "deterioration of traditional values and accepted standards of behavior", which had produced "the scourge of teenage pregnancy and substance abuse." And previous reports had detailed the rise of lawlessness caused by narcotics trafficking.

As for The 1994 national youth report – chaired by Anglican prelate Drexel Gomez along with other clergymen, police officers and youth leaders, we find that it was said that indiscipline, materialism and low self-esteem among young Bahamians had the potential to cause a social "catastrophe".

The Gomez report, as it came to be known, listed high population densities in Nassau, too many bars and liquor stores, squalid neighborhoods, limited recreational opportunities, education failures and the fact that single girls were having too many babies as among the chief factors shaping the behavior of our young people.

A consensus that these factors – among a plethora of others – had contributed to a rise in domestic violence, a decline in social responsibility and work ethic, a lack of national pride, more lifestyle diseases like alcoholism, AIDS and obesity, and rising levels of criminality.

Sadly, and as if these reports were all for naught, two more inquiries into the causes of crime are slouching towards either resolution or more public investigations.

In the meantime, the bloody drumbeat that is crime run amok in an independent Bahamas continues. Despite this information, we today wish all a happy Independence Day.

July 9, 2008

July 9, 2008 | 6:13 PM Comments  0 comments

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