Two is­sues came to the fore in Trinidad and To­ba­go this week that are co-re­lat­ed and which must be dealt with se­ri­ous­ly if we are to ad­dress some of the so­ci­etal ills that cur­rent­ly plague us.

In the first in­stance, there was an up­roar in some sec­tors af­ter the court seem­ing­ly hand­ed down le­nient sen­tences to Akeel Mitchell and Richard Cha­too, now adults but who were teenagers when they were charged with six-year-old Sean Luke’s 2006 mur­der.

Many found that the sen­tences of 17 and a half and 11 and a half years for Mitchell and Cha­too re­spec­tive­ly did not suit the grav­i­ty of their heinous crime against such a young child just be­gin­ning his life.

Some­where in her ar­gu­ment, High Court Judge Lisa Ram­sumair-Hinds not­ed that the con­vict­ed mur­ders’ ages at the time of the crime meant they could not feel the full brunt of the law, since they were mi­nors at the time of the act.

Lost in her judge­ment, how­ev­er, was the fact that even as the two spent years in jail await­ing tri­al, the sys­tem may not have suf­fi­cient­ly treat­ed their psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tions to de­ter­mine what led to their bru­tal at­tack against the in­no­cent child. In fact, some psy­chi­atric ex­perts ar­gue that it is on­ly when the prison sys­tem af­fords such treat­ment to pris­on­ers dur­ing in­car­cer­a­tion that they can tru­ly be re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed. Need­less to say, it is one of the as­pects sore­ly miss­ing from with­in our cor­rec­tion­al sys­tem and may be ham­per­ing pris­on­ers’ abil­i­ty to pre­pare them­selves to rein­te­grate in­to so­ci­ety up­on re­lease.

The oth­er is­sue that came up and which is linked is the con­cern raised by both the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty and T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s Child Pro­tec­tion Unit over a re­cent spate of sex crimes against mi­nors. The CPU’s Su­per­in­ten­dent Claire Guy-Al­leyne has in­di­cat­ed that a ze­ro-tol­er­ance ap­proach to such crimes has re­sult­ed in 1,016 cas­es of sex­u­al abuse be­ing re­port­ed and 86 of­fend­ers be­ing charged in the first six months of this year. Sta­tis­tics from the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty and TTPS mean­while show that more than 90 per cent of chil­dren who are vic­tims of sex­u­al abuse know their abuser.

Guy-Al­leyne not­ed that while sup­port­ing laws had giv­en them a boost to fight such crimes, the is­sue of men­tal health must be se­ri­ous­ly ad­dressed when weigh­ing the rea­sons be­hind vi­o­lence and sex­u­al abuse against mi­nors and in­deed, even adults. Tak­ing the is­sue with­in our prison sys­tem, there­fore, where, with­in our cur­rent jus­tice sys­tem, would the per­pe­tra­tors of such crime get such de­sired treat­ment?

To be clear, the is­sues of chil­dren com­mit­ting acts or mur­der or adults com­mit­ting child sex­u­al abuse crimes are not new.

Yet, if we nev­er ad­dress the psy­cho­log­i­cal is­sues which lead per­pe­tra­tors to com­mit crimes like those against the Sean Lukes and the un­der­age girls we have seen in cas­es in re­cent weeks, we may be con­signed to see­ing such prob­lems be­come worse, not bet­ter. In that re­gard, we urge the au­thor­i­ties to heed the calls from these two au­thor­i­ties to re­vise the man­ner in which this as­pect of the process is dealt with.