Preventing juvenile crime

Implementation of any character restructuring scheme would indeed need a multi-sectoral and multi-component approach. Crime committed by underage cohort of population should not be considered as a legal issue only. Taking into account of individual psychosocial make up and vulnerabilities should also be very high up in the agenda, and then only participation of activists of different sectors from health to children affairs to youth development to law enforcement can be ensured.

IT was not only a heinous act of murder or manslaughter, not only an evidence of deterioration of law and order situation or degradation of moral conscience, it was much, much more. It surpassed the boundary of law and order or morality, and should be more than a matter of concern or crisis. I am talking of a recent incidence of reported murder of a 12 years old child by his playmates due to fight over a game of cricket. It was not the only incident that happened in recent days, more than one similar events happened where foul play by friends and acquaintances were suspected when a teenager was drowned or killed in some other fashion. Recently, a number of sensational murders happened where the accused people were reported to be in their teens or early adulthood. Some of those cases were adjudicated and the victims were convicted and punished. Does it end there? How would we feel to see our children being handcuffed, remanded, found guilty of manslaughter and receive capital punishment or its nearest alternative? Why don't we think for a while and try to find out, at least tentatively, why this is happening, why our children are behaving in this particular way and what can be done to at least minimise its possibility to happen.

The inevitable questions that always haunt us are 'what goes wrong with these children? Why do they resort to a delinquent behaviour of such nature?'. Simple and definitive answers to such complex questions may leave the possibility of short sightedness and virtually there is probably no ready or easy answer nor is there any simple solution to the problem. No singular phenomenon can sufficiently explain the reasons our children are behaving in this particular manner. Genetic makeup, the parent-child relationship, the socio-cultural milieu, the educational and economic endowment, the history and heritage, the peer interaction and many similar factors may have their individual role in influencing and propagating the course of this behavioural outgrowth. May be, multiple factors eventually come together to establish this intricate fashion of behaviour. But in order to unravel the forces that bind the factors together to give the behaviour a particular shape, one may have to look at the dynamics of psychosocial development of a child, which is a little delicate phenomenon. If we fail to recognise the individual and his psychological development, and are unable to identify its relationship with environmental factors, our efforts to resolve the issue may appear really futile.

Most of our children can sail through the inevitable pain of growing, growing through quick changes and transformation of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Surprisingly, most of the young adults do not have any regret about their early days, rather reminiscence give them full load of pleasure and excitement. It happens because most of them grow up unscathed and mostly accomplished due to injection of norms and values of healthy living by their previous generation. This has been happening over generations and would probably never come to an end. Children and their parents and caregivers too, often fail to conceive this ever-happening reality. Unfortunately, things are completely different for a few and their families particularly who are identified as "disturbed". Deplorably true, they belong to an age group that has, in most situations, remained mostly unattended.

Each stage of human development is marked by its own vulnerability and stress of oncoming transition, and the youngsters rework psychologically the conflicts of earlier stages and gradually develop a sense of independence, separate out from authority figures and engage in experimentation with different events of life. Ultimately they emerge out as complete human being capable of assuming an adult role personally, socially and economically. Assumption of a perfect adult role becomes problematic if the role cannot be defined appropriately and is shrouded with ambiguity. Similarly, if the economic opportunities like employment and participation in economic development become restricted, then the problem of assuming an adult role becomes all the more compounded. In a very simple term, such a situation frequently exists in our circumstances and the prospective adults often look at their future very pessimistically and fail to anticipate a positive destined role in the society. Fortunately, many adolescents can manage to overcome these upheavals and transform themselves as fully accomplished independent adults. Those who fail to escape are compelled to lead their lives to different consequences. Scientific literatures suggest that one of the consequences is delinquency and anthropological research evidences indicate that a sub-population of delinquent adolescents exists in every society irrespective of any time boundary. If social justice system and cultural trends are influenced by unbefitting deviations, it may catalyze the behaviour of the affected cohort of people and there may be an overt expression of delinquent behaviour.

Adolescents, out of their juvenile sociability, invest most of their time in friends and an unconventional peer culture is formed. In the wave of many innovations and creativity of youthful peer culture added are gang activity, alcohol and drugs, sexual experimentation, TV violence and rock subculture, to mention a few. Among this deluge of stimuli some may aggravate and reinforce delinquent behaviour. It is not very difficult to point one's finger to one or more of those provocative factors and come up with a shower of recommendations to resolve the problem. However, although there are many societal elements in a complex situation like ours that need to be corrected, the truth that cannot be overlooked is that even the healthiest adolescent may have difficulties in identifying, deciding, assimilating and making sense of societal factors around his environment. The "disturbed" children are already victims of a real but immoderate inner chaos and have to confront with a particularly demoralised psychological structure, and therefore they find the environment around them all the more overwhelming and confusing. Some of them may even flounder, lose perspective and proper orientation, and begin to act up. It is true that under these circumstances any of the above stimuli of sufficient intensity may trigger or exacerbate a deviated behaviour and removal or censoring of a particular stimulus may perhaps eliminate certain type of delinquent behaviour and its consequences. It would not probably alleviate the problem in totality. Therefore, in order to take care of recurrence of a different kind of deviated behaviour on a different occasion, it may need psychological restructuring and socio-economic manipulation in tandem in a broader perspective.

In order to understand the delinquent behaviour, at the outset, one must look for the underlying motivation for a particular behaviour. Clearing up the slums, censoring TV violence, incarcerating for delinquent behaviour or even a capital punishment for proved commissions may bring in a temporary resolve or may assuage our frustration by paving the way for a specific and immediate action. Recently, a new correctional centre for girls has been inaugurated and many good things were told and heard on that occasion. The need for such an initiative cannot be overemphasised and intention of the effort should not go unappreciated. At the same time people may have different ideas about the functioning of the establishments. I had the opportunity of visiting the correctional centre for male offenders at Tongi and similar other public facilities in India and Sri Lanka. Everywhere, to my disappointment, I have noticed an inadequate, if not an absence of, effort for behaviour auditing, psychological grooming and character restructuring. Everything is being done on a daily agenda basis without any need analysis and set objective. Outcome of the endeavour is hardly measured against any mercury column and cost-effectiveness of this public investment is seldom evaluated.

Modification of environmental factors may sound a gigantic job and in most of the situations it cannot be separated from general socio-economic development of the country, and a comprehensive recommendation on those issues is beyond the scope of this brief communication. I would rather try to limit my propositions on the issues of behaviour analysis and character restructuring as components of any realistic future planning for prevention of juvenile crime. Some of the propositions may appear over-ambitious and time consuming, and therefore a bit more expensive. However, compared to cost of losing a prime age manpower, crimes committed, law enforcement, adjudication process and resulting incarceration taking together, the cost should be only meagre. Most expensive would rather be emergence of a crippled, restricted, deficient and disturbed adult population that the nation could hardly afford to bear with, if the problem remains unattended.

Like many priority development issues, lack of policy guidance may appear as a major hindrance in formulating any prevention plan for juvenile crime. A well-circumscribed policy in this regard may need comprehensive need assessment and information generation including their psychosocial interpretation, and may encompass wider provision for screening of newborns at least in hospitals and clinics for any development anomaly or neurological insult. For, these two birth defects in many situations are considered as major contributing factors in juvenile delinquency. Preschool life skill training for the children within their own community by familiar faces would facilitate shaping of character of the children in a desired fashion. One such programme that I saw about 17 years back in a remote corner of the Indian state of Karnataka has been reported to come up with a very good yield. It was the community itself who contributed the space and other amenities to run the facility with limited assistance from the government. In order to undertake such a programme what we need more is a set of trained manpower. These facilities may also play a pivotal role in parental orientation, counselling of disturbed children, formation of self-help group of parents of those children and organization of social support groups. Local community leadership may be offered to initiate and execute the initiative.

A massive information campaign for healthy lifestyle for children including positive media operations is essentially an important component of any prevention scheme. A well-balanced media and advertisement policy should be made available before any such campaign is set to float. The need for infusion of positive life skill training materials and their proper application in all levels of educational curricula development cannot be overemphasised. Similar initiatives should be in place in work place situations where many young adolescents coming from a "disturbed" background are working. Private sectors and business establishments may be encouraged to develop character shaping programmes in and outside the work places through provisions of appropriate incentives from the government and business associations.

Rehabilitation and preference in employment for young adolescents coming out of custodial care or incarceration should be given a priority and a small scale pilot initiative in this regard may give appropriate feedback before such an initiative is undertaken at government or non-government level. NGOs working for street children may consider the idea of integrating such a programme with their existing programmes. Law enforcement authorities may also consider the initiative as a part of the long felt need of community integration of their services and make the law enforcement efforts pro-people and multidimensional. Canadian Mountain Police claimed an encouraging outcome of their school-based programme for crime prevention in one of their publications. Health facilities should have an easy access of this particular population as a part of early psychosocial intervention. In order to pursue all these ventures and for social reintegration of the delinquent population the whole issue of juvenile delinquency needs to be destigmatised, which would however require a long-term motivational campaign. Along with rehabilitation process what is equally needed is healthy recreational facilities. In our situation of shrinking opportunities, we find our children really longing for breaks after all the socio-economic strain they have to undergo during different phases of life.

In brief, we may conclude that implementation of any character restructuring scheme would indeed need a multi-sectoral and multi-component approach. Crime committed by underage cohort of population should not be considered as a legal issue only. Taking into account of individual psychosocial make up and vulnerabilities should also be very high up in the agenda, and then only participation of activists of different sectors from health to children affairs to youth development to law enforcement can be ensured. It would however need decisions at the policy level to allocate required resources and establish coordination between different sectors. Development of an indigenous model with equal option of its application in the community as well as in the institutional care situation may be a worthwhile endeavour when any effective programme is almost nonexistent. Timely evaluation and periodic need-based modification of the model may open up a new door for intervention.

Dr. Syed Kamaluddin Ahmed is a mental health professional.