COVID-19 pandemic creates new social problems – PMI

Damian Hutchinson, executive director of the Peace Management Initiative (PMI), has noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has created new social issues and has exacerbated the existing situations and derailed social intervention programmes that were reaping successes prior to the pandemic.

“With COVID-19, young men 14 to 17 years are now at home dealing with all the negative factors that they face [and] that have now taken full hold of them. We won’t know, probably until later this year, that a significant number of them have dropped out of school,” he informed.

“It is also affecting the girls. We know of young girls who have got pregnant and are doing online classes, but the schools do not know that they are pregnant,” he informed.

Hutchinson made the assertions while addressing the Violence Prevention Alliance Steering Committee meeting recently.

He stated that young men who have dropped out of school because of the pandemic were being recruited into gang-related actives across the country. He, however, noted that the problems are fixable.

“When we do the case management work of these young men, the profiles are the same – they are school dropouts with poor literacy level, poor family support, and are subject to violence, among other things. But these can be fixed if detected early and we keep them in school,” he said, pointing out that young men dropping out of schools is the biggest risk factor that will influence them to join gangs.

He said the social intervention programmes can be addressed at different levels, such as a combination of treating with the low level of community development and using law enforcement decisively to limit the environment in which criminals operate.

The PMI executive director noted that accompanying this should be the deployment of initiatives in the medium to long term, targeting those who are being recruited in these criminal activities and who are already in violence-producing activities.

“There is a view that it is hard for persons who get involved in gang activities to leave this lifestyle behind. However, we see it differently. There are young men who want a positive change, but they need the support mechanism to make it possible,” he said.

The Peace Management Initiative’s mandate is to defuse community violence. It implements this through three main areas of activity: mediation, using community dialogue; counselling, for example, therapeutic and psychological assistance; and social development through the mainstreaming of high-risk youth.