JUVENILE delinquency has evolved from playing truant to indulging in harmless pastimes, such as going fishing or swimming during school hours, or picking fruits from burgeoning trees of absentee homeowners, to stealing and even murder.

Recently, police reported that a juvenile was apprehended for the murder of La Grange businesswoman Bibi Ramjit, aged 86, at her home at La Grange, West Bank Demerara. He has confessed to complicity in the crime. This follows a plethora of reports on such heinous actions by young adults, and even children in their early teens.

The first teachers of children are family members, essentially parents and primary caregiver, from whose interrelations they learn to socialise in the wider world. Behavioural patterns are imbibed from babyhood through observing the actions and listening to the utterings of the elders, even older siblings within their existential milieu.

Teachers and school environments provide their secondary learning landscapes. Upon attaining adolescence, the parameters widen; and this is the danger age, when emotions become very volatile, and when the urgings and opinions of peers prove more influential and impactful than those of parents. And if a child does not have a strong moral compass, their entire world can be turned upside down, if they choose the wrong ‘friends’ on whom they base their behavioural patterns.

Sound family environments could inculcate the requisite groundings that could armour a child against peer pressure that encourages wrongdoing, where observing and experiencing parental and/or primary caregivers who live decent, law-abiding lives invest in their personality a self-confidence that can strengthen their resolve to tread on the right path to adulthood, even if the consequences include alienation and exclusion from popular groups, members of which may have no scruples in doing prohibited things, and engaging in aberrant behaviour.

One study posited: “Broken families, single- parent families, separated families, frequent parents fight, lack of trust and confidence among the parents, criminal parents or psychological problems in parents can be the most important reason behind juvenile delinquency. The other reason can be sibling rivalry or unequal treatment between children. Parents and elder siblings have the responsibility to mould the personality of the children. When parents or siblings do not show moral behavior, or they commit crime, children or younger siblings also get motivation to do something bad, and engage in delinquent behaviour.

Continuing, the article hypothesised: “Often, the cause of juvenile delinquency is economic problems in family. Youths coming from poor economic status easily get involved in criminal activities; they want to improve their status, and for this purpose they use negative paths.”

Children who belong to a lower social and economic order are often ostracised in society, and this can leave ineradicable scars, creating dysfunctional adults.
Anti-social actions are learned behaviour. In the Guyana landscape, children often emulate their parents’ actions during protest demonstrations encouraged by their political or union leaders.
This aberrant behaviour witnessed by minors could potentially socialise them, at formative stages of their growth, into behaviour not conducive to acceptance by well-behaved peers.

The aberrant parenting style of delinquent adults is often passed from generation to generation, with teenagers bearing children, absentee fathers, families deserted by fathers, single mothers who, in efforts to earn an income, are often forced to leave, unsupervised, very young children who become prey to predators in their existential milieu, sometimes introduced to illicit drug usage and criminal activities that catalyses a medley of anti-social behaviour, sometimes leading to murder, as in the case of the allegedly young murderer of the 86-year-old robbery victim from La Grange.

The current Government is orchestrating programmes to address issues of school drop-outs, poverty-eradication in families and communities, and eventually create for Guyana a haven for its citizens, where no-one is left destitute, or feel inferior in a social and/or economic context.