Counselling is key to ending deadly family feuds - Scott

WESTERN BUREAU:

As concerns continue to mount in St James about the many incidents of persons being killed in family feuds, well-known western Jamaica-based family therapist, Dr Beverley Scott, is urging families who are involved in conflicts to use the various channels at their disposal to seek out non-violent solutions.

“They could have some mediation with someone in the family that all of them respect, maybe an older person, someone that both person trust,” said Scott, who, like many other stakeholders across the parish, is quite concerned about the steady rise in the cases of family feuds ending in bloodshed.

“If they don’t trust anybody in the family, you could ask them if they know any pastor. The church can help as well, depending on the church [congregation] and the pastor,” added Scott.

Earlier this week, former top St James crime-fighter Clive ‘Karate Georgie’ Lawrence, in responding to the fact that several of the over 50 murders committed in the parish since the start of the year involved families, some of whom turned to contract killers for assistance, said the police are facing a dilemma that goes beyond policing.

“The police are powerless to stop domestic murders, such as a man killing his girlfriend or vice-versa, unless one of the parties seeks the intervention of the police prior to any act of violence,” said Lawrence. “There are no preventative measures to address things like premeditated murders, which shows up in the murder statistics and can make the police look bad.”

Scott says that in the instances where disputes cannot be settled amicably inside a family, outside counselling and the assistance of the police should be sought.

“They should seek counselling; they should go to a counsellor,” said Scott. They could go to the police too because the police do counselling. The police are not going to lock them up for coming to report that they have a problem; the police would be very happy to help them because the police would not want to know the after-effect of the problem.”

Despite her advice, Scott is nonetheless cognisant of the fact that that there are not many counsellors at the disposal of the persons who need them, and was in agreement with the view that our society is not adequately equipped to handle family disputes that require intervention.

“No, we do not have enough family therapists and counsellors because they are few and far between,” said Scott when quizzed about the availability of counsellors. “Sometimes whole communities do not have even one person who can help, and that is very serious. I think Government should train people and put them in communities.”

“We have gotten to the stage now where people need to be deliberately trained and assigned to communities, and people need to know that this is the person in the community you can come to,” continued Scott.

“The Government needs to be more proactive; they are too reactive. When somebody gets killed, there is a big hullaballoo and there is grief counselling, but it is time we get proactive and stop the grief, and teach people how to deal with their issues so it does not escalate into murder.”