Garth Rattray

Recently, I was getting some certificates photocopied in York Plaza (Half-Way Tree). While waiting, I randomly surveyed the parking lot and couldn't help but notice two uniformed schoolgirls saunter up to a nearby column and just stand there. I'm always wary of extraordinarily neatlooking schoolchildren who appear obsessed with their appearance. Being tidy and well-dressed is one thing, but fastidiousness, always looking down at their clothing, tugging on this and that, and giving the appearance of being 'adult', tells me that education is the last thing on their minds.

No shame

It was mid-afternoon and I expected that they should be making their way home but, instead, they engaged in idle chatter. Their reason for dallying became clear when two grinning (uniformed and similarly overly-neat-looking) schoolboys walked up to them. As one pair began kissing (in full view of everyone), it dispelled all notions that this was an innocent rendezvous.

These 'children' looked to be around 16 years old, yet they had no shame or fear about their very public dalliance. My shock turned to dismay as I watched many adults walk by the smooching 'schoolers' without so much as a curious glance, disapproving stare or reprimand. By the time I finished exclaiming, "My goodness!" the lady behind the counter explained, "That is nothing. You don't see anything yet. They (schoolchildren from various schools) are out there all the time. You should see what they go on with sometimes."

Children beating teachers

Children gang-beating a teacher; children joining adults in chasing and stabbing another child to death; children killing other children; a little child taking a razor blade to school; children engaged in exhibitionistic, hard-core, videotaped sexual intercourse; children having sex on buses; children taking offensive weapons to school; children more sexually active than adults; children having children; children in street protests; children on the streets working (sometimes uniformed); children in political marches and rallies; children at all-night street dances; children accessing sexually explicit material on their cellular telephones, televisions and the Internet; children listening to and/or watching sexually explicit material on public buses. Children? What children? These actions are more like those of miscreant adults.

Although civil society finds the actions of those young people to be absolutely reprehensible, they are not yet of (legal) age and consequently must be considered as 'children'. We are, therefore, responsible for them and since their parents/guardians are obviously unable or unwilling to provide proper care and training, society must take the reins and steer them in the right direction or pay the price in the near future.

Long-term programmes

There is an urgent need to institute long-term, sustained programmes to guide, monitor and discipline errant children. The usual half-baked, low-key, short-lived campaigns will never do. Uniformed or not, children of school age are usually very easy to spot. There ought to be plain-clothes law officers and also, perhaps, duly appointed truant officers patrolling in pairs and with police communication radios.

We need to assign more urgency and importance to our children than we have to the temporary rice-shortage crisis. We need committees investigating child abuse and neglectful parents more than we need committees investigating the existing circumstances and aftermath of FINSAC (which, though deserved, I believe will come to naught - as usual). We need newer and better schools more than we need a newer and better Parliament building. We need new books for schools more than we need different guns for the police.

We have been adequately warned of things to come. We must act now to save our children and our future.