On juvenile delinquency, we need to come together

By JOSEPH K.P. VILLAGOMEZ

We need to come together to figure out what’s the best way to address the juvenile problems.
In general I believe we have a bulk of youth that are vibrant and great contributors to the well being of the community. These youth members are initially guided by parents, schools, and the community that provides activities to keep them busy.

However, like any population in a community, some youth end up taking the wrong turn so to speak. Everything that we see in any cohesive youth organizations or groups, we always find the opposite—the problematic youth. These youths are, one, usually from a family where their parents are involved very little. Two is that they dropped out of school or they’re not involved in schools at all and three, there’s no where for them to turn to, for them to stay out of trouble.

The youth tends to group together and the more they group together the stronger they become in doing some of the negative things. When we see youth-related crimes in the community it’s not just one youth because, like I said, they all have the same kind of thinking and agenda that’s usually a lot of them end up starting to use and experiment with terrible drugs early on in their lives that causes them to be in deeper trouble.

So I believe, in general, majority of youth organizations such as the youth congress, youth programs and school activities in support of the youth community, are very productive. There are populations in the group that we have to deal with, mainly those kids that are not necessarily doing well in the school and in the community.

Moreover, if you look at a profile of kids in that situation, they are kids from low social economic background, and with parents who work two to four times just to make ends meet that they cannot spend more quality time and provide guidance with their loved ones, so these kids end up hanging around with the wrong crowd and end up getting into trouble.

It usually starts with petty crime like going around the neighborhood making a mess with the trash cans but now lately the burning down of schools, the burglary in the schools, and you don’t need to look far, because the kids that are destroying those schools are mostly like kids who are attending those schools. You don’t see MHS kids burning down Kagman schools or elsewhere.

For whatever reason these group of kids in that school just burn down a facility where people put so much effort, time and money. They are depriving the other kids that really can benefit from the facilities. We do need to have a stronger approach in addressing this problem both from government and non-government sections.

We have youth programs that are coming up activities. These programs are needed to be highly involved in guiding more youths in the community. If these kids that are committing these crimes are not intervened now while they are still youth they are going to continue to commit criminal activities and probably more dangerous activities in the near future.

We’re starting to do several things, but we do still need to do a lot of things. One of them is the creation of the Juvenile Justice Task Force that would bring together all the key agencies that deal with youth programs, activities from DYS, Community Guidance Center, the Public School System, Court settings and others.

For the past two years, it has been active mainly to provide training and services to the people that are dealing with youth and equip them on how to deal with them. Next, couple of conferences and sessions will be specific to getting the youth involved.

One thing that these kids raise is that the adults don’t hear them and don’t listen to their pains; then let’s provide them the opportunity to be heard by letting them be involved.