So far for the 2022/23 aca­d­e­m­ic year, 5,362 sec­ondary school stu­dents have been sus­pend­ed for of­fences in­clud­ing as­sault with weapons, pos­ses­sion or use of drugs and ex­plo­sive de­vices, while the 463 pri­ma­ry school pupils that were sus­pend­ed in­clud­ed a 12-year-old for lead­er­ship of a gang.

In some T&T fam­i­lies, gangs have re­port­ed­ly tak­en over the role of par­ents and there have been al­most 10,000 cas­es of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence re­port­ed to the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) since 2018.

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Don­na Cox, who gave this in­for­ma­tion yes­ter­day, added: “And we lost 175 lives, al­so to do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, and an­oth­er 504 lives were lost to sui­cide.”

In her ad­dress on the first day of the Cari­com crime sym­po­sium in Port-of-Spain, Cox spoke about the “per­fect storm” of fac­tor adding to T&T’s crime prob­lem. she said from Au­gust 2017 to Ju­ly 2022:

• 1,811 chil­dren were be­fore the court in crim­i­nal mat­ters

• 1,405 cas­es were filed for chil­dren in need of su­per­vi­sion

• 27,095 cas­es filed for do­mes­tic vi­o­lence

• 8,609 cas­es filed for main­te­nance

• 13, 222 di­vorce cas­es filed

“Even more star­tling is the num­ber of in­ci­dents in­volv­ing sex­u­al and phys­i­cal abuse and ne­glect of our chil­dren. An­nu­al re­ports from the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty be­tween 2017 and 2022 in­di­cate 5,340 re­ports of ne­glect, 5,267 re­ports of sex­u­al abuse and 3,530 re­ports of phys­i­cal abuse,” Cox added

She list­ed so­cial me­dia in­flu­ence among fac­tors con­tribut­ing to fam­i­ly break­down.

“We’ve found that poor par­ent­ing is a ma­jor is­sue in Trinidad and To­ba­go. It can in­crease the like­li­hood of a child en­gag­ing in crim­i­nal be­hav­iour lat­er in life, in­clud­ing delin­quen­cy and vi­o­lent crime.

“In some fam­i­lies, it is re­port­ed that gangs have tak­en over the role of par­ents guid­ing our young men and women and pro­vid­ing them with a false sense of safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty.

“Poor par­ent­ing has a range of ad­verse ef­fects on chil­dren, in­clud­ing but not lim­it­ed to dif­fi­cul­ty form­ing healthy re­la­tion­ships, low­er aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ment, in­creased risk of sub­stance abuse, men­tal health prob­lems, in­creased risk of crim­i­nal be­hav­iour and in­creased school vi­o­lence,” Cox said.

“Speak­ing of school vi­o­lence, the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry re­ports thus far that for the 2022/23 aca­d­e­m­ic year 5,362 stu­dents were sus­pend­ed from sec­ondary school for of­fences rang­ing from ar­son, as­sault with or with­out weapons, cy­ber bul­ly­ing and pos­ses­sion or use of drugs and ex­plo­sive de­vices, to name a few.

“Pri­ma­ry school stu­dents, gen­er­al­ly un­der 12 years old, ac­count­ed for an ad­di­tion­al 463 sus­pen­sions for sim­i­lar of­fences in­clud­ing one child for lead­er­ship of a gang!”

“These find­ings are ex­treme­ly dis­turb­ing and me­dia re­ports of par­ents en­ter­ing schools to fight or vi­o­lent­ly en­gage teach­ers and stu­dents are sim­i­lar­ly dis­tress­ing.”

Cox said the da­ta pre­sent­ed, “when com­bined with each oth­er, cre­ates the per­fect storm” and paints a pic­ture of fam­i­lies in cri­sis.

“Fam­i­lies in cri­sis mean com­mu­ni­ties in cri­sis and com­mu­ni­ties in cri­sis re­flect a na­tion in cri­sis. When this is spread across the re­gion, we can safe­ly say our re­gion is in cri­sis.” she said

Cox said the T&T Gov­ern­ment ap­point­ed a com­mit­tee to take a holis­tic pub­lic health ap­proach to crime and vi­o­lence.

“This is co-chaired by the Min­istries of Health and So­cial De­vel­op­ment and has been man­dat­ed to de­vel­op a na­tion­al ac­tion plan,” she said, adding that in the past sev­en years Gov­ern­ment spent ap­prox­i­mate­ly $40 bil­lion on so­cial ser­vices.

“We’ll ex­tend our net fur­ther to en­sure bet­ter out­comes for cit­i­zens and ul­ti­mate­ly re­duce crime. Our con­tin­u­ous da­ta gath­er­ing will dri­ve de­ci­sions that iden­ti­fy mis­aligned strate­gies and help us re­frame,” she said.

—Gail Alexan­der