‘A bullet start to whine and put an end to their joy’
“The mortuary full with little Trinidad boys A bullet start to whine and put an end to their joy Now they lying tall for dey Mama to mourn Dey Nike gone, dey gold teeth gone You see they want dey pocket full with blue, blue silk They want dey statue drinking full cream milk The little red silk is not dey true friend De blue one had two extra nought on the end So ah tag on dey toe is now dey ticket to hell.”
—David Rudder
The great lyricist among us, David Rudder’s words were used as a dramatic start to the “Young Men at Risk No Time to Quit: Engaging Youth at Risk Executive Report of the Committee on Young Males and Crime in Trinidad and Tobago”. This 2013 report was produced by the late Prof Selwyn Ryan alongside other academics, Dr Indira Rampersad, Deputy Chair Dr Lennox Bernard, Prof Patricia Mohammed, and Dr Marjorie Thorpe.
With this goal: “This Youth at Risk committee report seeks to put equity vis-a-vis equal opportunity in perspective. It seeks to move beyond the narrow concept of sameness and embrace the concepts of difference in Trinidad and Tobago’s multicultural, multi-class society. The report argues that the young male population that is more at risk of directly being caught in the criminal world of drugs, guns and deadly violent crime are of African descent, especially those in urban ‘hotspots’ such as Laventille. At the same time, it focuses on the different problems young IndoTrinidadian males face in central Trinidad, their predilection to alcohol and related domestic violence abuse. It also addresses how women and young girls are both drawn into crime or become victims of the effects of male involvement in crime.”
Their findings were shocking then and undoubtedly worse ten years and a pandemic later. I would imagine given the news stories over the years that the demographic has changed so both major ethnic groups, Indian and African, are equally caught up in deadly violent crime. The committee which came to its conclusions after conducting a complete survey on youth and crime, compared hotspots, and consulted studies going back to the 90s. Their report stated that young men who are engaged in criminal activity have been described as “the missing generation.” The report warned that the population at risk is not only that of young men. It may be the future of an entire society. The report attributed criminal behaviour to what is by now familiar to citizens, “broken and dysfunctional families, juvenile delinquency, peer rejection, failure or disruptive behaviour at school, gang membership and incarceration … matched by the availability of drugs, numerous opportunities for young men to gravitate to crime as an easy but dangerous way to earn a living.”
While young men have turned to crime to fulfil their traditional role as “providers”, women have effectively used access to education by entering fields “that were primarily dominated by men at one time.” The report argues that one reason for this is that “young men have inherited a destabilised and disenfranchised masculinity, burdened by the realisation that they cannot fulfil the expectations of their masculine role and have turned to crime as a means of fulfilling the demands and expectations of their sex. Thus, the participation of young men in crime is fundamentally still linked to the idea that this group finds itself further marginalised in contemporary society.” The report states, “Education is the way out of poverty ... the heart of socio-economic development of any society.” Yet it’s not happening for the boys. “16.6 per cent in ‘hot spots’ never passed an examination while the figure was 9.5 per cent in ‘non-hotspot areas’ … in 22 depressed communities, 75 per cent never passed an exam.”
Seeking to explain this, the report points to socialisation and our education system since “boys are introduced to a culture still based on a hierarchy of power and strength governed by often stringent rules for becoming men, incidentally, attributes found in the gang counterculture. They also learn that some aspects of being human are off-limits because they are labelled feminine. These aspects include vulnerability, tenderness and even compromise attributes of the gang counterculture.”
The Selwyn Ryan report is available online, was paid for by the State and has sound recommendations for fixing the lost generation...Our mortuaries are too “full with little Trinidad boys.” We are losing yet another generation. As T&T prepares for Local Government Elections, its candidates, the Government and the Opposition would do well to consult it and come up with solutions on the campaign trail instead of the usual divisive politics this tired and wounded populace has come to expect.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.