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“Understanding is total comprehension that leads to application. When it comes, you become outstanding.”
Crime is an activity that involves breaking the law or an illegal act or activity that can be punished by law. It is an act that you think is immoral or is a big mistake. Other names for crime include: sin, misdeed, felony, fault, misdemeanor, transgression. It could also be seen as corruption. More names for it are: wrongdoing, misconduct, law-breaking, delinquency. Examples of criminal acts include murder, armed robbery, cultism, and drug trafficking.
How does crime start? Everything a man does starts from his mind; the mind is the engine room of every activity that a man (human) does. This could be positively active or negatively effective: if the mind is not engaged in positive activity, then it most definitely must be engaged in negative activity. Crime can or will step into a man’s mind when he or she is not active for good.
Record has it that crime is bad and defaulters must be punished, yet many youths engage in it. Most times I don’t blame them. Why, you may ask. It is because our parents didn’t tell us on time. In other words, most things that youth do today they learnt from friends. A child who is still tender-aged is highly likely to learn anything at any given time, so parents should be careful of how they react to what their child does. When parents fail to teach their children what to do, they can be misled by bad friends and leaders.
Teach them the right things and advise them on the kind of friends to keep. If not, crime will certainly creep into their minds and it will be hard for you to convince them to stop. We need to catch them young to avoid bad character as its hard to quit once imbibed.
Crime can start also from an unhealthy upbringing; it could be from growing up in a poor background, where family members have no love for each other. It is very obvious that anybody can commit crime so it is never a new thing in our environment, wherever in the world we live.
The young, the old and even leaders are the plotters of crimes. The funny thing is that whenever you mention crime everybody’s mind will rush to youth. It is not only the youth that are guilty. Rather, it started with the leaders then the youth learned from them. Now it is no longer a new thing; even a 12 year old boy or girl can commit a crime and still go free because it seems okay to people.
What can we do?
- Seek good advice.
- Create a loving home (atmosphere).
- Exercise your authority.
- Define your authority.
- Enforce rules promptly.
- Establish and maintain routines
- Acknowledge their (youths’) feelings.
- Teach by example.
What we (parents, teachers, elders in the community, leaders in the states, pastors, youth development ministers) all have to do is to catch them while they are young. Whatever we do, we should create time for the little ones (teenagers, youths) who are still growing, and for those who are already mature.
Creating a loving home (good environment) for them requires that we be their friends, if possible their best friends. We should teach them whatever it is necessary for them to know. As the Bible says, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Let youth know right from wrong. One may ask, “What about when they are in school?” Teachers should continue from where the parents have left off. Awareness of right and wrong is for the best, because when such things are known to them, they do better than if they weren’t told anything at all. It is wrong to deny them this knowledge, thinking that when they grow up things will be better.
When a certain law is passed the leaders should make sure it is being carried out and should define their authority: “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes‘, and your ‘no’ be ‘no’.” One of the most insignificant problem youths have is the example set by their leaders. When somebody wants to emerge as a leader he will promise heaven and earth. When he finally ascends to the throne, he passes his own law and, a few days after that, he deviates from what he said he would do. This affects most youth. Some learn to make wrong decisions while others will lose interest in leadership. Most youth and adults get frustrated. It would be better to “let all things take place decently and by arrangement”.
Another thing is that every youth wants the leader to know how he feels. It is the duty of the leader or parents to examine how they feel and know what to do about it because youth are prone to expressing their thoughts and emotions in extreme terms. Knowing what they want and devising a means on to solve their problems will make them love and run to you all the time.
In order to help reduce the rate of crime in our society we should, after teaching them, practice what we preach. It’s not a matter of teaching just once. It should be a continuous thing, for the more we talk about it, the more it registers in their minds- the central processing units of their bodies.
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Osita McEvidence
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