Anguilla was known to be a very laid-back, quiet, family-oriented, Christian society up until around the mid-1980’s, when its tourism product started to become a more formally developed industry.
What we saw happening back then, was that many of our women and young people were accepting gainful employment in the hotel sector. Up until then, women and young girls, in particular, stayed at home and took care of the younger children – guiding them, morally and behaviourally.
With the introduction of tourism, many of our women – who would have otherwise been at home – were now a part of the island’s workforce and spent less time with the young children. This meant that many children who used to come home from school to their parents, grandparents, and neighbours, now found themselves lacking that steady and focused supervision after school.
In addition to the new environment for young children to be raised in, i,e an environment with fewer healthy boundaries, a new reality confronted them – a reality where children came home from school to homes with no adults. The men were out working, and if they finished work at a reasonable time, many of them did not go directly home. Instead, they hung-out with friends, ran errands, did miscellaneous tasks away from home, etc. We started seeing in Anguilla, for the first time, generations of young people who were left to raise themselves because we, as adults, thought they could handle it. They grabbed a snack, watched TV, and played around with their friends and neighbours in the community, etc.
In addition to that big change, the government of Anguilla moved towards implementing a comprehensive education system which stratified children according to their academic ability and created a “Banding” system in the school. Children who demonstrated academic brilliance were “placed” in Band One, students who performed in the next tier down were “placed” in Band Two, etc. and if you were a child “placed” in Band Three or Band Four, you were considered – by many persons – to be someone who came to school “just to be baby-sat”. This created an environment where a significant number of children felt somewhat discriminated against.
Because of the lack of support from older siblings, neighbours and friends, and not having the needed guidance at home, many of the Band Three and Band Four students found themselves struggling with basic academic skills and concepts, and with no one there to nurture and encourage them to read, to do computations, to learn their times tables, etc. So, we ended up having a number of young people who became frustrated, felt shut out of the system, and felt discriminated against in school.
By the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we – as a society – had arrived at a place where it was possible for our children to advance through the school system and graduate from the secondary school without having the ability to read and comprehend text, spell basic words, compute simple maths calculations or know the times tables. Many of our children went all the way through the education system with no practical skills and ill-equipped to function normally in a changing society. This resulted in a lot of our boys, in particular, roaming the streets of Anguilla – aimlessly.
In the early 1990’s, some people sounded alarms that we were developing a generation of delinquents that could pose major problems in our society. The authorities of the day ignored those warnings, saying instead, that there were people in our society who are alarmists because predictions were made that if the growing problem of youth delinquency – especially among our young boys – was not addressed quickly, we were likely to destroy our society.
Reference was also made to what was happening in the US at the time – the deadly rivalry between gangs in major cities in that country. Back then it was observed that, in large American cities, if a community got “bad”, its residents could relocate to safer neighbourhoods. However, in Anguilla, we have one neighbourhood – the entire small island. So that, if and when Anguilla got “bad”, there would be no other “safe” community to relocate to. There would be no escaping from the violence. These warnings too, were all ignored.
In the mid-1990’s during a festive time in Sandy Ground, a gun was discharged at a function there. The island was up in arms about it. Today, if a gun goes off anywhere, it is not a big deal. It is not even topical unless somebody dies, and that too, is only topical for a day or two, and then dissipates regardless of the persons involved.
Over the last 10 or 15 years, more than twenty of our young men have been laid to rest in graves – dead. Already for this year – 103 days into 2022 – we lost three people to gun violence, and for the most part, we believe that the perpetrators of those violent crimes are young men.
Our Police Commissioner said in a recent report at the government press conference that Anguilla has very little crime. What he failed to realise or convey to the public is that when you project three murders in 103 days, and you annualise it, we are looking at 10 murders for the year. If you project 10 murders in Anguilla’s population of under 15,000 people, Anguilla has the 3rd or 4th highest murder rate in the world as calculated: the number of deaths in a society per 100,000 people.
To say that Anguilla is a low crime jurisdiction, is very misleading. If one puts it in the context of the jurisdiction’s population, then it will be blatantly obvious that Anguilla has a major crime crisis.
So, Anguilla, did we shoot ourselves in the foot when we opted to introduce tourism in Anguilla the way that we did without catering to and looking at the social fall-out and the educational fall-out?
Did we shoot ourselves in the foot, Anguilla, when we introduced tourism and a comprehensive education system at the same time, without catering for the least academically-inclined among us, failing to realise that they would become so frustrated and so disenfranchised that they would contribute so heavily to make their own lives and yours miserable – intentionally or not?
Did we shoot ourselves in the foot, Anguilla, by not realising that the ones in our society whom we failed to lift up, pull up, and bring up would be the ones to change the face of Anguilla?
This is the reality with which we are now confronted.
What is still happening in our society today, is that we tend to be protective of our daughters – especially when they reach the teenage years. We don’t want our young daughters to become pregnant or to be perceived as girls of ill-repute and embarrass the family. On the other hand, our boys are still allowed to do whatever they want. We have five-year-old and six-year-old boys roaming the streets in the evening hours, under 10-year-old boys running around the village at 2’oclock in the morning during Carnival time, or 10-year-old and 12-year-old boys hanging around night spots in the wee hours of the morning – these were early signs of problems “back then” and they still continue to be so “now”.
We see many of our young men unemployed, because of their inability to read and write, and function adequately in society – because we failed them. They hang-out around the street corners selling drugs, robbing and shooting at each other – not because they hate each other, but because of frustration. They are sometimes related to each other, they are neighbours, they used to be friends, they grew up together, went to school together, drive through each other’s neighbourhoods – even now – buying drugs at night. But the devil finds work for idle hands to do.
These young men – although they are committing senseless crimes – are also victims. They are victims of this society (Anguilla) that has failed them. The alarm was sounded early that this was coming if we did not arrest it. When you talk to most of these young men, listen to their stories about the conditions under which they live at home, you will hear that most of them live with a single mother who is working two and three jobs just to put food on the table. And sometimes, they are young men of affluent parents in Anguilla – affluent dads who impregnated their mothers, gave them a little money and a few things but never passed around to see them that much. Children don’t need cash and presents; they need your physical presence in their lives every step of the way. They want you to believe in them and help them to grow, to understand and unravel life for and with them.
The police, and most of us in society, want to hunt them down and throw them in prison…but they are victims of our failure as a society. We look down on them and scorn them on the street as “nobody”… because we neglected them when they needed us the most. It is up to us as an Anguillian society to stop this vicious cycle of criminal behaviour. If we don’t, we will continue to shoot ourselves in the foot, Anguilla, and if we are not careful, some of us will end up shooting ourselves in the head…because of our own guilt that we, as a society, have caused it.
— CONTRIBUTED by a hurting middle-aged native observer—
