For years, social studies on Belize's crime climate has shown that the knee-jerk, paramilitary response to crime hasn't worked for any sustained period of time.
Well, one organization is trying to come up with viable proposals to offer them to the government as alternatives.
That organization is the Mental Health Association, and today, they held a conference at the SCA campus.
The association believes that child abuse whether physical or sexual, may be a major contributing factor to youths who grow up and turn to a life of crime.
Here's what the President told us:
Jenny Lovell, President, Mental Health Association
"We've become very concern about the increase, the spike in crime and violence among young people. We also realize that because we've been getting calls - we've been seeing children that are being brought to us with behavioral problems. When we talked to these children we find out that they've been sexually abused. We find that for some of them they have things like learning disabilities and so they are in classes giving a lot of problems but it's not because it's just bad behavior - they don't have no clue what's going on in the classroom because a lot of them they are in Standard 4 but can't read and write in fact they can't even recognized their letters; their ABCs. So we realize that some of these children are learning disable or they are other things going on."
"The big thing we found is that a lot of these kids are going to school hungry and so a lot of the kids are out on the streets hustling, I am not talking about the anti-socials - I am talking about the ones who their mothers are at home and they send the kids out to go look for food. So you see them on the streets; the little ones, not in school and should be in school but they are out there looking for food asking you for one dollar and then you see them run to buy food."
"We saw all of this and we decided this year for our conference we wanted to address what were some of things that impact on children that don't come out as crime and violence. We want to come out of this conference with scientific researched information to hand to the government and have some resolutions that we take to them because honestly I believe that our leaders need to be guided. It cannot be that we just respond or react."
Dr. Jadon Webb, Child/Adolescence Psychiatrist
"The researched is kind of startling that come out in recent times that actually suggests that rates of cancer, diabetes even heart attacks can come from episodes of child abuse even before a child could talk. It's really quite startling and we are sort of seeing an emerging pattern that a lot of bad things that happen to us over our life span - anything from depression to suicide behaviors and again even a lot of physical health effects many times can be traced back to these bad things that happened as children."
The conference continues tomorrow, and after that, the association hopes to approach the Government of Belize with proposals to more effectively combat crime and violence.
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