Empowering Youth to Beat the Odds: A National Priority for
South Africa
16 June 2017
Imagine a South Africa where
every at-risk underprivileged youngster has
the opportunity to reach his or her full potential. A South Africa in which the starting line for
each youngster is at the same point from the finish line, and in which each has
the same quality and quantity of training in preparation for the race.
Today, with most economists agreeing
that South Africa is the most unequal country in the world, this utopian dream
seems as out of reach as it was 41 years ago, when Hector Pieterson and at
least 175 other youngsters died for similar ideals.
At NICRO, we deal with the
social consequences of that inequality on a daily basis.
The childhood profile of the
average juvenile offender we work with is something like this: born into a poor
and broken community, dysfunctional parental influences (with parents either
working far away or simply absent, whether literally or metaphorically),
exposed to emotional, physical and/or substance abuse and violence from a young
age, inappropriate male role models (family members who are gangsters,
criminals and/or addicts), lack of structure and discipline in the domestic
environment, lack of play and creative physical spaces, and the product of a
sub-standard education system that is neither designed nor able to plug all the
gaping holes in that child’s survival armour.
What chance does a youngster have to make it with that sort of start in
life?
It is at this tipping point
that NICRO’s Youth Justice Programme intervention is critical. Armed with the newly-acquired social skills
and tools (which many of us take for granted as a product of a normal childhood),
vulnerable youngsters are empowered to choose to change their lives for the
better.
Not all of them do: some go
back to the safety of what they know, and perpetuate a lifetime cycle of crime
and imprisonment, with the negative cumulative impacts on their families,
communities, taxpayers and society at large. But the majority of NICRO’s juvenile
offender clients do choose to beat the odds, and make different decisions,
better decisions. They choose to rewrite
their life stories.
So successful are our juvenile
offender interventions that NICRO is advocating for national-scale, similarly-designed
psycho-social behaviour change interventions for at-risk youth, way before they
enter the criminal justice system.
NICRO believes that a specialised
and intensive focus on life skills (defined by WHO as ‘abilities for adaptive
and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the
demands and challenges of everyday life’) is a critically important component
of a holistic education.
Without it, we are setting up our
youth to fail.
Science and maths alone will
only take them so far. Turning that
knowledge into successful income generation and a stable family and community
life requires an investment in their personal development, equipping them to
deal with the multitude of perils an underprivileged young adult faces in South
Africa.
Crime costs South Africans
about R1.84 trillion a year, or roughly R34,160 per citizen (Institute for
Economics and Peace, 2016). Large-scale
investment in youth life skills (so it becomes a well-resourced, foundational
tenet of national education policy) is a cost-effective and efficient way of
reducing this economic burden.
It is also a cost-effective
means of beginning to address the rampant inequality gnawing away at our dreams
of national prosperity, and of equipping current and future generations of
youth to reach their dreams and achieve their full potential.
Again, imagine a South
Africa where every at-risk underprivileged
youngster has the opportunity to reach his or her full potential.
Belinda Bowling is NICRO’s Head of Business Development and
Marketing.
