Dear Editor
I WOULD like to commend a certain writer, Sean Ori, for his articles on rebuilding the family structure.
This is one aspect of failure in Guyana by successive governments, communities, and social service agencies alike. Overtime, Guyana’s traditionally strong family structures have been and continue to be replaced by an overwhelmingly prevalent and accepted trend of single-parenting. The social effects are enormous. Dysfunctional behaviour and criminality are two common resultants that persist.
My focus is on the importance of promoting and maintaining strong nuclear families, and inadequacies within social service agencies that impede family development. A nuclear family can be basically defined as a (married) couple and their dependent children, regarded as a unit.
While I am no expert on social issues, my own experience and interaction with others concerned about the crumbling nuclear family structure have bolstered my conclusion that the state, social agencies and even some religious bodies have lost direction and focus on the importance of strong families and benefits that are derived by preserving nuclear families.
In this country, there are very few incentives outside of emotional bonds for sustaining the nuclear family structure, and when the latter weans or is otherwise challenged by exogenous factors, families merely fall apart. Ironically, while the challenges faced by contemporary nuclear families are invariably similar to those of our foreparents, the values and commitment that upheld those former families and marriages are now being deemed unnecessary and primarily challenged by the sustained campaigns of liberal feminists, sexual-orientation advocates and aggrieved antagonists. One may argue that the current dynamics are different, but that’s another story. There is a direct link to religious prophetic fulfilment of a deviation from God-ordained principles regarding what constitutes the family.
While recently discussing the state of moral decay, disintegrating families, prevalence of child-sexual abuse in our society and some root causes for these plagues (such as absent or otherwise excluded fathers), I was told by one of our more experienced social workers that I am purely biased and classifying these national issues based on some grievance. I was also chided for being in the wrong profession. I found those comments to be as flattering as they were amazing. Those statements by that social worker spoke volumes regarding the mindset that guides our social work approaches, agencies and policies that may not see the greater good in seeking to promote strong families. If members of the public have grievances with our social services, then it is an indictment against those agencies for failing families and the society at large. Maybe there are too many social workers with personal grievances administering service to society. Maybe our social service agencies should revisit their recruitment and contractual policies. You cannot put a canoe sailor to pilot an aircraft.
Stereotypes, stigmas and bias should never be encouraged in our social service agencies when addressing challenges in families. In too many instances of family decay, the male (husband, father) is invariably stereotyped as the deviant and responsible party for challenges in the home, while the female (wife, mother) is championed as a victim of circumstances who has limitless rights and no responsibilities. Partners in family relationships should be guided through a process that emphasises tenets like mutual respect, unselfishness; short, medium and long-term objectives, conflict and crisis management, and generational effects.
The great famous Greek philosopher Aristotle said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – end of quote. What this means is if parts of an organism are removed, it is not as useful as it was as a compound. This is also applicable to the family.
While the state and social service agencies cannot compel people to live stable lives, they can collaborate in creating mechanisms and/ or incentives that promote family stability. These can take on varying forms such as education, taxation, medical and housing benefits or grants for families that maintain stability, just to name a few. It is important for us to reward achievers in the same way that we seek to protect those who may be unfortunate in their quests for happy, stable families.
Social service agencies must recognise that more needs to be done to strengthen families instead of having them disintegrate or stagnate at the whims of gullible traps, excuses and sensationalism. The state must also be cognizant of the impact that weak and fragile family structures have on current and future generations. Any country with a high level of single-parent families as we now boast in Guyana must be undaunted in its quest to confront and resolve the root causes and effects if that country is serious about social order and societal development.
The strength of any nation is premised on the strength of the family.
Our sociologists are positioned to speak to the underpinning effects that redundancy, literacy, laws, employment, attitudes, religion, etc. and their inverses have on impacting families, and articulate those implications to help in guiding our social services, as well as policy and law-makers.
When things do not occur naturally, the state and its representative bodies can create stimuli for such things to occur and function in more structured and civilised ways.
In my view, the state should conscientiously establish programmes and meaningful incentives that encourage strong and stable families. Concurrently, religious bodies, social groups, and the private sector ought to reconsider their individual and collective roles in seeking to salvage this very important pillar on which nationhood is built. The recent heinous sexual assault and murder of young Leonard, that potential Berbician Physicist, highlights our glaring societal crisis and state of the family. Throughout the entire episode I did not see nor hear anything about his father!
Regards
Orette Cutting