Dear Editor,
One of the questions that most people are grappling with is how is it possible that those who are responsible for the recent massacres are mere teenagers. Kaieteur News reported recently that the gang which is controlled by wanted man Rondell ‘Fine Man’ Rawlins consists of mainly teenage boys: Otis Fiffe – 17 years old, Robin Chung –16 years old and Dwayne Sancho – 19 years old. At such tender ages these young men should have been in school studying, but instead they were a part of a notorious gang, planning who next to rob and kill.
Where are the fathers? This is the question that startles me. From the recent media reports, it seems as though only the mothers are around to give accounts for the lives of these young boys. Had their fathers been in the home, the outcome of their lives may have been different.
Many young men today have been raised in families where fathers have neglected their responsibilities to their wives and children. Many young men are looking for love, protection and someone whom they can admire, someone they can look up to.
When fathers fail to be that someone, then men such as Rondell ‘Fine Man’ Rawlins will take that place in the lives of our youths. The result is our children become criminals in society.
Part of a father’s responsibility towards his family is to love, protect, provide, teach and care for his family.
The presence of the father in the home affects how a child thinks and behaves. The presence of the father in the home also influences the values with which a child grows and matures.
To a great extent, the father’s presence influences the outcome of the child’s life.
I encourage every father to be a man and face up to his responsibilities. What our children become tomorrow greatly depends upon our fathers today.
Yours faithfully,
Navindo Tinsarran
Navindo Tinsarran, as a Guyanese Dougla woman, I back up your question 100%. Now I await these “child fathers” or “baby-fathers” to come and to try to eat your head off.
Then, fear not, I ssure you, this woman would be 100% in your corner.
STOP BLAMING THE ABSENCE OF FATHER’S FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN SOCIETY.
Amen you sure got that right. You will always find this kind of spin being used to deflect allention to a larger social problem in Guyana.
When you Law Enforcement going into Buxton and other African Guyanese populated enclaves and harrassing youths what the hell do people expect the reaction to be. Is there a fatherhood problem in Palestine where youth are involved in similar patterns of behaviour. The capacity of people to to analyse issues of Guyana through blinders of stereotyped formulations is infinite.
Yes, there is need for fathers to be more involved in the lives of their kids. But the argument that absence of a father in child’s life is a prescription for that kid becoming a lout is absurd, and cannot be nexussed to any scientific sociological study of this scenario. Typical Guyana, where the sophomoric passes for wisdom, and the facetious that facilitates people’s double entendre allusions are clapped loudly by those with shared sentiments.
The sentiments here are true and I and alarmed at the amount of youths willing to go the route of crime. But the financial realities in depressed communities and some women must also be blamed. Some fathers can hardly take care of themselves muchless their families.
Some women feel that getting children will generate financial assistance from men. Women have to say no to children until they are 100% convinced that the fathers are in a position to provide long term. There is need for education of both men and women but mainly special interest groups should get women to learn income generation skills and how to protect themselves against multiple prenancies. It may be harder to get men to change their promiscuous nature.
I agree that fathers are important in the lives of their children, but I do not agree that the presence of fathers could have prevented all or some of our teenagers from joining Fineman’s gang.
Additionally, I’m always amazed as to why letter writers don’t comment about the presence or absence of fathers whenever they write about the corruption of the morally bankrupt PPP regime.
Also, why not ask about Roger Khan’s father? Or about the fathers of the many so-called prominent business people who deal in illegal drugs, launder money, and smuggle fuel and liquor into our country?
I believe that some people merely feign interest in our teenagers so as to be able to cast their stereotypical aspersions about the Afro-Guyanese family.
Moderator’s comment: Thank you for resending your comment. In future, please be careful about where you post. Please note that the comment was published when it was attached to the wrong thread. It was only removed at your instigation, but by then, the second comment (seen as a duplicate of the first) had already been deleted.
Carl
I believe that some people merely feign interest in our teenagers so as to be able to cast their stereotypical aspersions about the Afro-Guyanese family.
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And this is represent my views also Carl. The youths in question were black, so the opportunists, as is their norm, ressurect their learned stereotypes and use it facetiously to expound and wax hypocritically.
I completely agree with Mr. Tinsarran; his expressions are not mere sentiments, but rather, proven principles. Studies have shown that the presence of father, or lack therefore, influence the outcome of the lives of their children to great extents.
The fact that fathers play important roles in the lives their children is not restricted to any ethnicity or social class. The influence of fathers are shown in the outcome of their children’s lives, whether these children become criminals, politicians or both. The same can be said of any ethnicity or race.
Are we to conclude then that this fatherhood dislocation is a recent phenomenon? Because there is no precedence in Guyana for the circumstances that gave rise to these scientifc deductions. Just when did fatherhood dislocations become a compulsive operant for young boys in the African Guyanese community to take the path the subject of these creative analysis did?
Since we were not producing child soldiers in the past, we do now, and blame it on fatherhood dislocations, should’nt we be also examining what might have cause those dislocations? And just when did those dislocations begin and why? I mean we did not have child soldiers during the era of slavery in Guyana when the manfestation of fatherhood among the African subjugated population was being forcibly restricted. We did not produce child soldiers during the era of colonialism. We did not produce child soldiers during the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and the the 80s. In fact, the overwhelming majority of fatherless homes then were producing well rounded sons, scholarly bent, with many going on to great things in Guyana and abroad. Just when and how did this powerful operant began influencing young boys to leave their mothers control and align themselves with armed gangs?
What are the variables that existed or did not exist prior to the advent of this phenomenon? After all, when you assign yourself the authority to psychoanalyse a community at least have the honest to do a thorough job. And what about those situations of Youths from other communities who commit the most horrendous acts of violence upon relatives and members of their own communities. Is there a fatherhood problem there also?
And that folks, represent the cockeyed nature of how we examine things in Guyana. Killings and torture and mutilations are only an indication of pathological flaws when the perpetrators and victims belong to subjective segments of our population.
Greg, you make an excellent point about women and I agree with you. There is simply no excuse for the women in my race to try to trap a man into marriage by getting pregnant but there is also the question of the age of some of these women as apposed to the age of some of these men to consider. That–and it takes two to tango! Two, you see, not one.
If “baby father” can barely take care of himself, then there is such a thing as a condom or leave well alone. He can’t have it both ways and he cannot escape responsibility, not sir, he can’t. But I’ll get to that later.
Poverty as an excuse for crime….If I had a dollar for the amount of times I have heard that one, I would be a millionaire. What really comes first, Greg, the chicken or the egg. Is poverty a bi-product of promiscuity or is promiscuity a bi-product of poverty?
Fact: Two people trying to make ends meet in a marriage are far more likely to attain to middle-class status, or even rich if they dream hard enough and work hard enough as a single unit, a family….while on the other hand, a single parent is at the mercy of all that is out there that could test her faith, her strenght and her financial capabilities. And usually all that could go wrong, will go wrong! Could you imagine that burden being bourn by just one person?
Most likely she will be poor, and in most cases, so preoccupied with trying to put food in their mouths, the roof over their heads, that the area that suffers the most would be parenting and only God knows, it is the area that is in need of the most attention, and continues to be!
I see the “Baby fathers”/”Child fathers” have surfaced, some even yelling, throwing childish tantrums, still trying to abdicate their responsibility. You can’t! You see, your little “products” or “bi-products” of the heat of your loins, are now wreaking havoc upon society! It’s a fact. Deal with it already!
“Stereotypical!” …lovely word, isn’t it? And if you add a touch of “aspirations” it almost becomes soup when sprinkled with a generous dose of “denial.”
You see, “stereotypical” is an excuse to keep the supply of young maidens available for the taking. How about the solution? But who really wants the solution when it entails that the supply of young maidens to defile will dry up?
What a question! What a question! What a question! Where is the answer? Please….
Nothing is wrong with a little ducking and hiding sometimes. See, the problem becomes compounded when we start ducking and hiding from ourselves. No one then is left to look at the proverbial man in the mirror! So please, allow me:
There is a breakdown in public safety and yes, men who defile young maidens, one after the other, leaving in their wake, a broken path of a collection of “child mothers” or “baby-mamas” instead of one happy wife and children who saw their mothers being respected by their fathers must bear as hugh a part of the responsibilty as should these “baby mamas.”
What also breaks down public safety are mothers who do not teach their daughters the value of self-love, self worth and self respect, mothers who have not been taught these values themselves, so that when these men with dishonorable intentions aka predators, aka Zipper Jack, come knocking at their door, she and her daughter(s) could sic the dogs on him and laugh aloud as he scoots wide-eyed up the road.
Would that there should be a daddy there to laugh with them as well! But alas, that is the problem that we are now addressing!
You see, “values” is not the meat that “we devour” at meal times and on these blogs and forums to get rid of it at the first call of nature, like we would try to get rid of a conscience that haunts us long after a bad deed has been committed, it is the decency that “we instill into ourselves” “was instilled into us” and into our loved ones, so that our actions, theirs, do not turn around and harm us, those around us and then the wider society at large.
The social and psychological impact that these fatherless children and defiled young maidens bring to society, is yet to be measured, but if ever a study were to be done, it would have to start with these “child fathers”
What their fatherless children grow up to do to, or not do for society is partly their fault and the fault of the women who think that it is okay to get a child out of wedlock.
And the cycle of young maidens being defiled by these men, some of whom already married and advanced in age is yet to be broken, so these “child fathers” continue to be the parasitic predators that harm society.
Let’s conduct our own little study here: Go out there and ask these men, you know who they are, if they are married or has ever been married, ask them how many children they have “outside” if they are married, and how many “child-mothers” they have. You might even get two or three as an answer!
When you are finished with that, turn your attention to the prison population and the crime stats. Interview the prisoners in jail, find out how many of them grew up in single-parent homes and how they dealth or could not deal with it mentally, who they killed, raped or maimed to get where they are, count those people into the stats as well and pin that too on the social and psychological impact of the “baby-fathers”/”baby mamas”
I propose to you people, society would be much better off if we direct our energies towards finding a cure for these “baby fathers”. They are the ones who are the biggest threat to public safety.
Carl, the question you should be asking yourself is this…why, when Roger Khan and the likes of him came/come knocking on Black doors looking for ‘recruits’ to be their foot-soldiers, were/are they so many Black children answering the call as apposed to others?
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in the bucket…..
Gap1, I’ll do everything in my power to avoid debating this issue with you because I suspect that you are unworthy of my time and effort on a matter this serious.
Suffice to say that all of my kids were born in wedlock, to one woman whom I have known and have been happily married to for more than 20 years.
No amount of intellectualization will destroy the fact that the male is promiscuous by nature. They are there to respond to the wishes of the perpetuation of the spiecies by females. Women have the power to set the guidelines and standards as to when and how they with utilises male advances. Society has given them the option of saying an emphatic “NO”. If a man tries to turn that no into yes he is breaking the law.
A lot of men revel at the fact that there are a lack of strong guideline set by women and while fathers who know the game will advise their young daughters on the way to conduct themselves, I feel it is up to women’s group to address these problems and advise women accordingly. Men can only be preditors if there are preys.
You have identified part of the problem here Gap1. You wrote, “What also breaks down public safety are mothers who do not teach their daughters the value of self-love, self worth and self respect, mothers who have not been taught these values themselves, so that when these men with dishonorable intentions aka predators, aka Zipper Jack, come knocking at their door, she and her daughter(s) could sic the dogs on him and laugh aloud as he scoots wide-eyed up the road”
In referrence to questions about the Indian community, my observations are that they also face the same problems but they have a different way of dealing with out of wedlock pregnancies. They make them disappear. They mostly only encourage pregnancies in stable relationships.
Carl, it is wise of you to avoid debating this issue with me. You have, as you can see, already lost the debate.
You are married and we all had our children in wedlock. We and whose Black army out there are married and have children in wedlock?
This is not a debate for me and many Black mothers who want to do right by our children, Charl. This is our reality and we must speak up when people in our race continue to bury their heads in the sand.
I am the mother of a very lovely Black girl-child, 12 going on 13, whose Tera Nova is 98 percentile, New York State is 4 grade point average and who attracts more than her fair share of attention from…apart from boys her age of all races, which is normal, they can look, but also some sick old men who are old enough to be her father and grandfathers. You want to debate me, you’ll have to find yourself defending these sickos because they do exist in our race, sometimes I feel more than they do in others.
The Black race is in crisses mode, and who wants to bury their heads in the sand is free to do so, I won’t! I’ve got too much to lose.
gap1
You want to debate me, you’ll have to find yourself defending these sickos because they do exist in our race, sometimes I feel more than they do in others
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So much for rational analysis. So much also for comprehension. Why not post the language he used to defend “sickos”. The man said that he did not believe that that the problems could only blamed on fathers.
It is hard to conduct a debate with people who makes leaps of logic with nothing to substantiate it but the certainty that it makes them exceptions. What percentage of the young blackmen in Guyana come from fatherless homes, and how does that percentile juxtaposition with those involved in Criminality?
Black people have been more damaged by the insidious alignment of those within their midst who based their arguments on racist stereotypes that comes from those who have always been antipathetic to anything black. These are no different than the recruits Roger Khan was able to get to go out and kill their own kind. They both reason the same way. They both use the facet of tearing down their own as a means of propelling themselves individually above the rank and file. If this is the example of caring for the black race, well, there is really no need for those hostile to this group to lift a finger. Not when they have so many acolytes within who get a glow from this kind of differentiation exercise.
Justice4all, ah! You do awake my imaginings, my friend! But do you even want to go there with me?
Gap1:
http://www.guyanesereunions.com/guyanaforums/showthread.php?t=935
“Before I make that leap into Guyana, I would like to make a few more observations about the Black American social contruct.
American history advanced eventually to where there was in fact an emerging political and intellectual class and initially, it emerged as apart from the influence of the church. It also, very astutely attempted to break the stranglehold of the The Collective in favor of The Individual development, Case and point:
Garvey said, “MAN KNOW THYSELF! For man to know himself is for him to feel, that for him there is no human master. For him Nature is his servant, and whatsoever he wills in Nature, that shall be his reward. If he wills to be a pigmy, a serf or a slave, that shall he be. If he wills to be a real man in possession of the things…..”
Now note, Garvey spoke directly to the man and the woman in his race as a part of a wider human race but not as a pathetic down trodden group. Note how much responsbility he gave to the Individual man/woman. Note the individual to whom he spoke, was expected to have total control over his life, not a dependency on a “master” or “pastor” or “Race of people”. No only as a man! In this case an African man! And here is another Garvey who keeps refering to the “One” the “He” instead of the “Collective”.
Garvey:
SHALL THE NEGRO BE EXTERMINATED? The Negro now stands at the cross roads of human destiny. He is at the place where he must either step forward or backward. If he goes backward he dies; if he goes forward it will be with the hope of a greater life. Those of us who have developed our minds scientifically are…
Again, the individual. Note Garvey didn’t say “Negroes,” but “Negro!”
Now bear in mind that this was the man who bought the Black Star Line and paid for it by selling Shares of it to mostly Black Jamaican Americans and this ship actually made a successful return journey to and from Jamaica. We all know that Garvey wanted to make that trip back to Africa but that never panned out for well known reasons. However the main point here being a different “Individual spirit” added to the Black American “collective struggle” via the church. And incredibly, they pushed back!
Then of course, there was W.E.B Dubois!
Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential Black leaders of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged Blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of the whites. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing the Black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many Black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the black community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.
Note: W.E.B Dubois differs diametrically from Margus Garvey. Unlike Garvey, Dubois led the struggle from within the Mighty Monilith, where in there, the Black man “needed to be freed from oppression”, and not given the tools to “free himself from oppression”, as was Washington’s approach, which more or less had great similarities with Garvey’s: through self-serving actions, which is to educate then demand. Sort of getting the tool first, then moving in to do the work. So clearly, there were two schools of thoughts and angry divisions within the Black Civil rights movements.
At one time, I believe WEB Du bois and Garvey had various heated exchanges of words and in fact before Du bois’s conversion to Garvey’s Pan Africanism, he actually spent years demagogueing the Margus Garvey’s movement.
Enter: The age of the “Halo” or “Hallowed Leaders” and it’s Global Effect On Minority Struggles and Politics.
While all of this was going on, the Black church began to become increasingly political and in fact started a new movement to the struggle, that of the politically religious. Now leaders who were polical emerged from the actual church itself, and one of such was the Rev Martin Luther King.
King had studied Ghadhi’s “passive agreession” very carefully and discovered that if a political cause could be encompassed in a religion light, it would be very difficult for the powers that be to attack.
Ghandi, even though he had been a lawyer in South Africa,(prestigious, but not the most nobel of professions,) had incredibly managed to exchange that image for that of The Mahatma, which means “great soul”, which meant “holy man” or “the chosen”.
Dr. King was a quick study and we all knew the great success he had in such a small space of time, thus by the time Burnham was Prime Minister, he had two very successful cases to study, that of Ghandi and Dr. King, of how to use religion to achieve political success.
Burnham however, would be the first exception to those two, he would not use it for the good of “his people” as had both Dr. King and Ghandi, but he was going to use it to first acquire vast amounts of power in Guyana and then he would use it to retain it.
In addition to that, he had the experience of the ealier slave trade to study, whereas the White man gave to slaves, his image and likeness to worship and therein essentially made himself “god”, Burnham dared not be accused of blasphemy, at least not yet, so he made himself into a “Mosses” to “god’s people”, while he borrowed dishonestly from Socialism, what he found useful to this plan, and so came “Comrade Leader!”, “The Man”, “The Great Oratator”, “The Kubaka”, all geared to create an image that could not be best or at least better and so to his supporters (his kith and kin), he became the best in class!
And so, similar to the slave trade, the “collective” was adapted for its success rate over “the masses”. And so Burnham’s task was to gather Black Guyanese under one PNC umbrella, and just as the slave master did centuries ago, he brought out the fear card to wield it! Only this time, it was not God that he had taught Black people to fear, (the slave master had already outplayed that one and besides, Burnham didn’t need hellfire.), it was:::::::::::::::::::::::::::
http://www.guyanesereunions.com/guyanaforums/showthread.php?t=935
Your questions and analysis here are quite legitimate. There are reasons why our young men are now joining gangs in Guyana. The answer has to do with governance, financial hardships and the reaction to signals sent by our leaders. My responses thus far relates to the topic “where are the fathers”.
If am to respond to why young men would now want to be child soldiers I would have to go down a very different road. One simple sentence is that others have faced similar hardships and they chose to deal with it differently.
it all started when the people of buxton gave cover to the jail breakers mr justice4all. Young men need people who they can look up to as role models. The fathers are not there to have any influence in their lives. The jail breakers came in and filled that void.
When one family in buxton decided to stand against the bandits being given cover there the entire family was attacked. And for ur memory think when the police and army started to be in buxton. It was after the jail break and they had info that they were in buxton.