The breakdown in family life in Grenada has manifested in a myriad of social fractures that have consistently, and perhaps obstinately, been addressed as independent issues instead of symptoms of a root problem.
Just as a patient’s illness cannot be cured by addressing their various symptoms, only by treating the root cause, our society cannot recover from its downward spiral of decay unless we address the origins of the chaos we are seeing.
The family is the essential, basic unit of any nation and the litmus test for the nature of its society. It should be a safe, nurturing, teaching-learning environment, a place of love, provision, and belonging. It is a reservoir of cultural practices affording continuity of values, and a means of preserving history.
When familial relations become strained due to a feeling of rejection or isolation; insecurity; inadequacy; verbal, sexual, or physical abuse; believing oneself to be undervalued; or frustration because of the absence or insufficiency of someone or things; and the members feel as if they cannot depend on or trust one another, the family eventually breaks down.
Though fatherlessness, sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, extreme anger, and drug addiction also cause degradation of the family, the stress of simply being a child in an environment where parents/stepparents hate one another is destructive to the unity, sense of comfort, and belonging a family should provide.
Failure of the family has led to some critical gaps in social cohesion that we are facing today. In fact, it has become a major problem – gangrenous, one might say – but we are not without hope. Some of these societal problems may not even be seen as attributable to a breakdown in the family – but they are.
One of those problems is gangsterism. Why would a young man choose that alignment? From the testimonies of many current and former gang members, they are/were in search of a family – even if, at times, they didn’t put their desire into these words. To them that ‘family’ represents loyalty, safety, love, provision, and friendship.
Fatherlessness – whether of the physically absent type or the physically present but distant type – often leads questing adolescents to the family-like gang lifestyle, where they call each other ‘brothers’ and the king pin is like a ‘father,’ usually an older man, who takes the authority and trust that comes with the paternal role.
Many young men have not seen the path of responsible manhood walked out before them and so embrace the counterfeit – the men who themselves are broken vessels with money, gifts, and control.
Young men also turn to gangs to escape the claws of poverty – wealth accompanies the drugs and other illegal activities they participate in – and to satisfy a need for power. For some, their destitution makes the price for their loyalty to these gangs cheap – just groceries when they were desperately hungry.
If you were a 12- or 13-year-old with a violent, irresponsible, drunken single mother, who was more hungover than conscious, and you were more starved than satisfied, and a gang leader visits you, bringing food, would you refuse him? And if he promised family, belonging, provision, and love if you’d join him, how many needy young boys would deny him? This is a professed account.
Often, being victims in helpless situations during their childhood also drives many young men to the need to feel in control, to gain respect, which often results in an attraction to gangs and violence.
To have the control that was beyond their grasp is a very real lure– sometimes, the gang leaders even grant faithful recruits control of others at a young age. This provides a sense of purpose, usefulness, and indispensability as well, but the price is always too high in the short or long run.
The more unsavoury aspects of the gang life – threats, beatings, torture, murders, thefts, territorial wars – become the activities these young men participate in willingly, considering it a return on what the gang invested in them, or even defending and helping their ‘family.’
It is a small price to pay to get so many ‘rewards’, they think; and before long, repetition numbs them to the barbarity that lifestyle requires – like the conflicts over territory, where innocents may be caught in the crossfire.
Many of us perceive these conflicts as being just about a colour or some sort of rivalry, but it is not so. They take over territory not for the streets or the buildings – but for what is in them: for prostitution homes, and drugs hidden in stash houses (sometimes) not known by police, etc.
Although Grenada has sparse records about many aspects of local life, anecdotal accounts seem to agree with Western and Eastern practices of recruitment since the boys are around 12 and 13. In fact, some local schools are recruitment centres and known points-of-sale for marijuana.
Of course, some youth are recruited otherwise. Everyone in a gang has his own recruitment story, but the reasons for their involvement are some combination of the above – and are the result of a desperate search for ‘home’ when where they live leaves them deficient.
In addition, the human heart cannot function with evil acts continually, so many gang members will inevitably get into the occult and become hosts for demons of violence. They perhaps never thought they would get there. The truth is when one starts at recruitment, there’s no telling where or how things will end.
The failure or absence of the family can lead to all the above situations. Where can these young boys turn for help? This is not to excuse these detrimental behaviours, but to say we have to help them heal – because they truly are broken – and help the family. Restore the family, restore the nation!
We cannot do justice to reasons for gangsterism and family breakdowns without addressing prostitution, because it’s as much a cause of family dysfunction and fatherlessness as it is a common feature of gangster life, an unfortunate circle of pain.
Though prostitution is pervasive in areas where there is high unemployment, low standards of living, and much familial fracturing, it also exists where there is high gang activity and little good, local policing.
The nature of prostitution breeds a home where there is great instability for the child or children who result from it – whether they live with their mother and her partner/s, or with a father/stepfather – and they are frequently neglected, left alone, and often, subsequently succumb to intense pain and hate.
But those in the trap of prostitution can be helped to restore families. These broken homes feed the gangs with new members, fuelled by their feeling of hurt and indignation, who in turn aid in the breakdown of familial and communal relations.
The gang culture necessitates division, sometimes even in individual families, which aids in the isolation of splintered groups with enmity between them, causing further societal degradation.
Though, of course, most Grenadians are not gang members; we often form our own ‘tribes’ along political lines, some family splits over party politics even leading to divisions between generations.
The disintegration of our society into independent, hostile groups, whether over gang affiliations or political allegiances, has caused rifts in families, which result in polarisation on a national scale.
The decrease in home ownership due to the high cost of acquiring and keeping a home leads to many Grenadians living with their parents into adulthood, often parenthood, and frequently, grandmothers being the heads of households. Though, of course, this is not true in all cases, these large extended families also increase the risk of incest among members.
The incest problem is one we halfway deal with but simultaneously pretend does not exist; we have marches against it sometimes for Child Month, put up signs, promote songs occasionally; but it subsequently falls under the radar and festers.
Even the Child Month messages are not directed to perpetrators of incest, even if they are stakeholders in the education system. Home, which should be a place of security, becomes a place of abuse of the weaker members by the ones who should be protectors – it is a horrendous aberration of familial relations that needs to be dealt with at the level of the soul as much as with the law.
Perpetrators of incest are frequently (though not always) those who were victims themselves and became abusers. The preventive medicine for the incest problem is restoration of the soul and the family.
What happened in Carriacou with the murder of 14-year-old Esther Patterson should never have happened. What family life did her killer have? But Esther is a turning point. It is in such a time as this that change must come to Carriacou and Grenada as a whole.
We need to remember that just as fruit which falls and is damaged, people rot from the point of injury. And on a national scale, this rot, this point of pain, has begun in the family.
Grenada needs a change of heart. There needs to be a revival of love within individuals, within the families; the hearts of the fathers must be turned to the  children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.
There needs to be a change of course for all the perpetrators of the degradation of the family; and forgiveness needs to go viral that the nation may heal. Unforgiveness, like the saying goes, is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
There needs to be reconciliation where possible, and – this may be difficult to take – forgiveness on the part of the victim, so that they may be set free, delivered. No one is beyond redemption; it is their choice that gets in the way.
Let this be a call for soul-searching and a commitment to changing course. Everyone was born to solve a problem – everyone is important for the society to function. The degradation of the family could deny people the ability to realise their own potential – they can be railroaded by the counterfeit destinies promised them by the gang lifestyle; the quick, easy wealth promised by prostitution, or other enticements.
When you lose sight of what you can be, other things occupy your vision – and the choice is not always easy – but when you give yourself to a thing, it gives itself to you. If you want to do the right thing, the right thing comes.
Grenada’s hope depends upon restoration of the individual, for people to accept liberty granted to them through Christ – the only true kind of freedom that lasts; that is accompanied by peace. A brand-new life is possible for Grenada, but we, as a people, have to embrace it.
We need to address the family crisis – this gangrene of the spirit – in this country because we do not realise we are infected – our wound needs to be lanced, debrided, and cleaned for us to be cured. The cure is a return to the family as it was intended.
Look at the nations that systematically destroy families – not their public relations, look at them as they truly are. See if you want to live there.
Zarah Chase