Juvenile Delinquency

In recent times, media reports and observation reveal all manner of vices that young people are practicing. These vices include rape, defilement, alcoholism, drug abuse, and burglary as well as robbery – in short juvenile delinquency is on the rise.

In communities across the length and breadth of this country, parents have become indulgent to the vices of their children. This is because our society is gradually misconstruing discipline to be an act of wickedness; thus, young people think that they have the right to do as they please without recourse to what is right and appropriate.

In some communities parents naturally feel that it is offensive to call their children to order. Some parents are of the view calling their children to order shows that they don’t love them. So to express their parental love is to let their children be.

Again, in communities where the burden of child upbringing is the sole responsibility of mothers, there is the tendency for these children who are usually adolescents and teenagers to be left unto themselves in situations where the mothers can barely provide. What really happens is, these mothers end up asking these adolescents and teenagers to go out and fend for themselves as well as to support the home too.

These mothers really do not care what these children do as long as they are able to fend for themselves. It gets worse if the child is able to support his/her mother financially with whatever he/she makes. The child assumes the position of a bread winner and as the saying goes: “you don’t bite the hands that feed you”, the mothers are mute over how these children make the money they bring home.

Upon assumption of the role of bread winners, these children are left on their own and they become a law to themselves. An evidence of this situation is common in some communities of the Wa Municipality. These communities include: Dondoli, Tagarayiri, Jengbeyiri, Limanyiri, Sokpayiri, and Nayiri just to mention a few. These are traditional communities of the Wa Municipality. In the mentioned communities, there is a high upsurge of tramadol and marijuana abuse. Poor parental control, bad exemplary lifestyle of elder siblings as well as peer pressure are at the root of the prevalence of all manner of social vices and consequently juvenile delinquency in the Wa Municipality.

One of the dangerous things that young people in these communities do is to dare one another on who has the capacity to take more pills of tramadol at one go. Another thing that some young people do is to mix marijuana with the popular “ataya” – a kind of leaf that is boiled for tea. This they do to get high and enable them engage in all manner of social vices as well as activities that have no bearing on their holistic development.

Consequently, truancy, school dropouts, teenage pregnancy as well as child mothers, burglary and armed robbery are high among these young people.

Sadly, there’s a cultural trait that prevails in these communities – one that finds its expressions in the local parlance: “tizaa bunyeni” – which means, we’re one people. This otherwise positive trait which was meant to unite people in these communities for development and peaceful co-existence is being used to left suspects off the hook. This usually happens when family members mount pressure on victims of burglary, robberies and all manner of alleged crimes to withdraw cases from the police station and get it settled at the family level.

Checks reveal that most criminals who are serving jail terms in the Wa Central Prisons are between the ages of 17 and 23 – a situation that should attract the attention of opinion leaders in these communities. There is a need to make young people in these communities understand that none of the vices and its consequent predilection to crime pays.

It therefore behoves the religious as well as traditional leaders and parents in these communities and to take the bull by the horn and collaborate with state institutions such as the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), the Ghana Police Service, the Narcotic Control Board and other communal agencies to help rehabilitate addicts as well as prevent all forms of vices and consequently juvenile delinquencies. This will rather pay off than applying a positive cultural trait to let suspects off the hook.

The rise of juvenile delinquency in our communities nationwide is an indication that both communal and state institutions must wake up and arrest the situation so as to have a future of responsible and law abiding citizens.

The writer is a freelance journalist. [email protected]/[email protected]