State of emergency- youth in trouble!

Victoria Seiketso Sethibe | Thursday June 9, 2016 16:05

If you are given a responsibility to raise or care for children in whatever way, you should know that crisis is brewing when you are driving to attend a traditional wedding ceremony at half-past-five in the morning during the weekend and somewhere along the way you see a group of about six to 12- year-olds already playing in the street.

Sometimes if you create a moment to talk to them briefly, they would tell you that the parents are at home sleeping and that they are used to playing from that time till sunset during weekends or school holidays.

The same child who leaves home before sunrise and arrives home after sunset is the same child who is going to give his or her family and teachers a headache because of some misguided habits they pick on the streets such as violence and distribution of illicit drugs at school.

Smell a rat when you pop in at a shopping mall and you see some idle teenagers each having a 2 litre bottle of fizzy drink before them and the liquid inside does not look anything like the original contents of that bottle.

That black liquid in a 2 litre Fanta bottle could most probably be illicit drugs.

Crisis is brewing when you LISTEN to a troubled child and they explain how their biological mother disappeared to a faraway place some years ago and how their step mother has currently started treating them with resentment due to their father’s uncontrollable infidelity.

It gets even worse when this child has to move from this uncle’s house to that aunt’s house each time they face some adjustment challenges.

Every child certainly needs a place they call home and it is not a pleasant experience if a child is consistently feeling like a visitor, even in a place they are supposed to call home.

There is a crisis when you hear a concerned parent explaining how her neighbours lost their child to crime due to their busy schedules.

Sometimes, or maybe quite often, a busy schedule would include; going to work, followed by a strategic women’s financial support meeting or men’s local football club meeting, finally followed by an all-night prayer, something deviant children usually resent.

There is nothing wrong in CHOOSING to go for an all-night or all day prayer because we live in a world of choices, but there is everything wrong in having children who do not seem to fit well in a parent’s schedule.

It becomes even worse if the only intervention a parent chooses is to pray away the deviant behaviour in their child.

Smell a rat when you are in your house and some strange people knock at the gate and desperately try to recruit you and your children into a church you have never even heard of.

I am not anti-church, but I have come to realise that churches are increasingly being created to manipulate congregants, youth included.

I remember this other time when I was driving out of my house and these three strange women suddenly stop me by the gate asking if I could give them a moment to teach me about “godeee the matha” (god the mother).

Getting agitated I said to them “Please give me way, I need my space, thank you” and drove away. “Godee the matha” my foot! My faith dates back to my Sunday school days at Methodist church and never in my childhood have I ever heard about godee the matha.

I urge every young person out there to be smart and not trust too readily.

There is a state of emergency when a teenager tells you that they have migrated from their sexually abusive house or negligent parents to unofficially stay at a church mate’s ‘boarding house’ together with a few other needy children.

In that case you start wondering whether this newly found caretaker is a real good Samaritan or whether these children are just in a ‘feedlot’ waiting to be exported, now that human trafficking is rife.

If you are a young person and are tempted to migrate from your parents’ house, the least you can do is to see social workers in your area before doing that.

They have a full time job to assess and intervene in such instances.