Today it is all the rage around this town to talk on and on – and sometimes even wax poetic- about youth at risk, young men at risk, or for that matter society at risk.
Everyone seems to have something to say about the costs of so much risk. Umbrella organizations are duly formed, church pastors and others who say that they have been “called” routinely weigh in with their views as to what should be done to rescue the perishing.
But as those in the know would readily admit, crime is today a trans-national phenomenon, shaping the trajectory and direction of any number of price-taker nations in the world.
There are large currents, which determine the extent to which local society can respond to stressors coming in. In some instances, victims of crime are themselves socially stigmatized.
In this regard, note well that hundreds of forced-ripe young women continue to populate the Teen Mothers Program. Indeed on any given day the attentive public can fasten its eyes on a gaggle of young pregnant women.
Many of these Bahamians are school age girls, and some of them could berape victims, statutorily defined. And yet again, if the attentive public wished it could focus its attention on the scores of young men who are caught up in the coils of a criminal justice system which apparently views most of them as just so much fodder for a machinery which must have “criminals” in its clutches, even if that involves the manufacture of “crimes”.
In this regard, the reference is offences such as vagrancy, loitering, and using obscene language to the annoyance of a police officer.
The entire Caribbean – inclusive of Aruba and The Bahamas – is subject to assault and depredation at the hands of homegrown and foreign criminals.
Indeed when reference is made to the connection between locals and foreigners as far as crime is concerned, the fact quickly emerges that crime is in so very many ways quintessentially trans-national.
This has direct and immediate consequences for how the authorities must deal with the issues that arise on any given occasion. Take for example a hypothetical case where a couple might be killed execution style in a small island state in The Pacific, authorities would be foolish to assume that the crime was rooted in the country or locality where the dead bodies were found.
Granted the means at their disposal, it would not be out of the question for the victims to have met their fates at the hands of other tourist type travelers. Quite evidently, there are foreign connections in crimes like human trafficking, drugs smuggling and money laundering.
As Fulvio ATTINA the Jean Monnet Professor, University of Catania notes, “International crime is in continuous change. It becomes more diversified every day, moving from traditional fields, such as gambling, loan-sharking and prostitution, to international automobile smuggling, art and archaeological theft, arms trafficking, trade in illegal wildlife products, credit-card fraud and other transnational enterprises.
As he also suggests, “a crime organization may prefer a particular sector of crime rather than others, but most organizations act in drug traffic, arms trade, prostitution and the international recycling of dirty money – this last being the natural complement of all kinds of criminal occupation.
“Modern technology in the banking, communications and electronic sectors has provided criminals with new tools enabling them to steal millions of dollars and to launder their huge illicit profits across borders and continents. For that reason, in present times, money laundering is the most important step in the crime process to attack national and transnational crime.
The same professor notes that crime business in all its forms (like drug trafficking, illicit arms deals, stolen cars, child pornography, prostitution and smuggling of migrants) was worth $95 billion ten years ago. Today it has more than quintupled. Some $500 billion changes hands in the global criminal business each year – more than the combined value of international trade in petroleum, steel, pharmaceuticals, meat, fruit, wheat and sugar (Giacomelli, 1996).
The Bahamas and its sister nations in the Caribbean are caught in a cruel trap. The contours of the trap that happens to confine them are there for all and sundry to see and examine. Having been persuaded that they can and should become welcoming societies, practically all of them have poured their hearts and souls into selling their countries as perfect places, veritable pieces of paradise on Earth, the kinds of places once associated with Utopia.
But as we know from the crime statistics, places like The Bahamas, Aruba, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and any other tourist destination all have their share of crime, some of which is directly linked to the tourism industry itself.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
