Dear Editor,
I refer to your editorial “A sad story” of 21 November as well as other recent articles and letters concerning atrocities committed by youth against youth and sometimes against adult persons. Earlier this month Guyana was rocked by the senseless killing of a Mocha schoolgirl allegedly by two teenage boys. The reflexive instinct is to lock them up and throw away the keys, or to inflict corporal punishment or worse. All may satisfy our sense of outrage, yet many of us recognize that Guyanese society has become so deformed we will continue to produce individuals, youth, who will commit such crimes. Mocha, Naamryck, Parika, and Warren, we sense, will be followed by more.
The Minister of Education is right that part of the problem might arise from the education system, which spews out youngsters with dubious academic ability destined to find their way through life without a moral compass and the underpinning value system that separates us from animals. Individuals – especially the growing numbers of young marginalized men living alone – need to be integrated better into the networks of mutuality and reciprocity on which a well-functioning society rests. Then at least there may be some chance of making the potential deviant recognize the consequences of breaking basic human rules on such a scale – and of embedding him in social relations that can act as a constraint. I was not surprised that one of the young men in the Mocha case said “
