By Robert Andre Emmanuel
Senators on both sides of the aisle yesterday shared similar sentiments regarding the value of parents taking responsibility for raising their children and steering them away from being affiliated with gangs.
Yesterday, the Senate debated and passed the Anti-Gang Bill of 2024, which seeks to discourage and criminalise gang behaviour in the country.
The Leader of Government Business, Senator Samantha Marshall, who presented the Bill, said that the government cannot be expected to raise someone’s children.
Senator Marshall, who is also Minister of State with responsibility for the Ministry of Social Transformation and Gender Affairs, said the social transformation ministry “cannot capture everyone”.
“We are seeing demands placed on Social Transformation because parents will not be parents,” Senator Marshall said, noting the Prime Minister’s recent meetings with members of two gangs.
“I sat in the back of one of those meetings and I counted how many parents were there and I did not go onto my second hand … so I commend the parents that showed an interest and spoke, but where are the other parents and [in particular the fathers],” she noted.
Speaking about her past experiences as a lawyer, Senator Marshall spoke to how some parents’ broken relationship with one another negatively impacts their children—a sentiment also shared by Senate Minority Leader Shawn Nicholas.
“The reality is mothers come to court and because of the bitterness of the relationship, they don’t want the man to see the child, he can’t take the child around the new girlfriend … they make all kind of excuses, and the child is the one who suffers at the end of the day,” Senator Marshall said.
While supporting the Bill, Senate Minority Leader Nicholas addressed the role of mothers in father-child relationships post-separation.
“Sometimes we women are at fault,” she said, criticiing the use of children as ‘bargaining chips’ in parental disputes.
“Raising a child is not a one parent activity or life experience … relationships end all the time, marriages break up all the time, but the children should never suffer as a result, and we cannot wait until it’s too late to ask ‘where is the father?’… we need to take some responsibility where that is concerned,” Senator Nicholas stated.
She said there needed to be a holistic approach taken to curb anti-social behaviour among some young people, calling for the schools, church, civic organisations and villages to be involved in the lives of children.
“But we cannot fool ourselves because many of our homes are broken homes and sometimes, we bury our heads in the sand and say, ‘what happened to the home’?” the Senator added.
