The Problem Of Juvenile Crime Needs Urgent Intervention

The motivations for youth crimes, including those by juveniles, are well chronicled and documented. The catalogue includes lack of parental control, social media perverse influence, poverty, lack of educational and employment opportunities, inequality of income and wealth, feelings of machismo engendered by boozing and getting hooked on drugs, grudging and implied glorification of crimes in films, and the delusional assumption that they will get away with it. Invariably, it is not one single factor that is at play. Rather, it is a combination of the above and other factors.

Again, the causes and motivations are not of the one-size-fits-all variety. Boys and girls from the poorer strata of society, whose worldview of grinding poverty is the single most significant cause of domestic and social discord, see in crimes the quickest and easiest get-rich-soon opportunity. They hear all the time about the phenomenal income earned by film stars and pine for such riches for themselves and their struggling and squabbling parents. They become willing handmaidens to big-time gangs and contract killers for what appears to their minds as a fabulous payoff.

In the middle class, economic factors and societal influences predominate. The starry-eyed youth from middle class look to social media to shape their thoughts as well as shaping others’ thoughts. Indeed, they belong there much more than others. Social media is a double-edged sword. While their role in spreading positive information cannot be belittled, it is their dubious and dangerous role in pandering to base instincts and glorification and championing of wrong causes that is most worrisome, defying control by nation states. That they are in the virtual world, thriving with the protective shield of anonymity, makes dissemination of wrong and dangerous information easier and faster. The impressionable minds latch on to negativity with more alacrity than they do positivity.

While the causes of youth crimes are well known, what is required to wean them away should engage the policy wonks and governments at all levels across the globe more than helplessly and fatalistically wringing their hands, bemoaning the all-pervading conducive atmosphere for such crimes, including financial crimes more rampant in the virtual world these days. Ethical hacking has got a whole new meaning for the tech-savvy swindlers.

First, parents must start asserting their domestic authority after stopping squabbling with each other, which every time ends in domestic violence that creates bitterness and a deep sense of wound in young minds. It has become fashionable for parents to leave their children alone more to be seen in the company of Joneses. Harried, double-income-earning couples rationalise such abdication of their grooming role, saying smugly that a child must be allowed to learn herself through trial and error and from the environment. While a child does learn from the endogenous and exogenous environment till the age of 12, according to psychologists, that is no reason for the parents to adopt the self-serving hands-off policy. Spending quality time with children has become cliched and hollow. Dining with the family and reading moral storybooks to children before bedtime are all character-building exercises that should not be scoffed at.

The lonely child misses her parents when they are away toiling at their workplaces and seeks solace in social media and sometimes in brain-warping drugs. The void could have been filled by her grandparents. But the breakdown of the joint family for a variety of reasons has had the effect of grandparents being either left alone to fend for themselves or getting shunted from one nuclear family of their wards, either in the same city or across towns in India or abroad, to the other. The soothing, if indulgent, presence of mellow grandparents can improve the quality of the family life, including that of the lonely child, considerably. The NRI families in the USA have already revived the healthy practice of having a comforting elderly presence in their families by inviting their parents, who take turns to visit their homes for six months. The grandchildren bask in their attention. 

Children should not be allowed to become couch potatoes and watch violent and otherwise meaningless films on Netflix and Prime Video that are in addition uncensored. Of course, parents and grandparents must lead from the front and set an example by pursuing active hobbies and sports. Children must be told vicarious participation in sports like watching IPL on the television only enriches the team owners and the channels. They must take to demanding Olympic-grade sports. An empty mind is a devil’s workshop is not an exaggeration. Sports build character. Glorification of cricket and cinema has been responsible for the passivity of our children that shows up every four years in the Olympics.

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Cigarettes and liquor are not sold to children the world over. Alas, a similar law could be put in place for selling smart cell phones. But then such a law would remain unenforceable, what with indulgent parents pampering their children with handsets often at the age of ten, which they rue soon enough.

To be sure, latter-day children are tech-savvy, but that extracts a price by becoming an unwelcome distraction from a fuller and healthier life. Every scientific advancement caters to both constructive as well as destructive use. Witness the atom bomb. And now the virtual world is powered by the Wi-Fi and data card. Pornography and crime have got a great leg up from these two. Parents must learn to leash their children from their pernicious influence. And that cannot be called hammering in the nail that sticks out. Unbridled freedom can be counterproductive, especially in the hands of impressionable minds. Why this impassioned plea to rescue the youth from cybercrime as well as physical is for the simple reason that it is at the impressionable age one can be moulded. While juveniles are indulged by the law and justice systems, once they cross that hallowed status and are found committing crimes thereafter, their entire lives may have to be spent inside the slammers. Youth power is needed for nation building.

S Murlidharan is a freelance columnist and writes on economics, business, legal and taxation issues