Curbing Youth Violence in Our Society

Nowadays, youth’s involvement in violence has become a serious problem in most communities across the globe. Violence is an intentional use of physical force or power that threatens or terrorizes individuals or groups in a community. This usually brings about injury, psychological harm or even death. It is believed that parents, community as whole and government have a significant roles to play if truly we wish to make our society violence free.

Parents are responsible for the individuals in their households. And every violent-child comes from a house managed by parents. If every parent takes their responsibilities serious, for instance by enrolling their children in schools, monitoring and mentoring their behavior and cultural conformity at home, sensitizing then on issues that can threaten their future life, and giving them valuable piece of advice daily, every child or youth will definitely become constructivist rather than vandalist or peace-breaker.

The cooperation among members of the community – regardless of individual’s race, gender or financial status – also is a crucial factor for preventing youth violence. How can this be achieved? We can encourage togetherness by establishing a communal consultation forum charged with the responsibility of providing, among others, awareness programs for the youth, supporting government security officials and establishing communal entertainment and empowerment. Surely with communal collectivism violence of all sorts (most especially among youths) can either be drastically alleviated or completely eliminated in our society.

More so, government has very important roles in preventing and controlling youth violence in the community. These days most youths are facing numerous socio-economic challenges like unemployment, lack or inadequate of recreation/sports facilities, low level of education attainment/substandard education system – most especially in Asia and Africa, shortage of vocational training centers and increasing number of graduates. All these usually lead to youths’ involvement in violence. Recent survey conducted in 2010 by Youth Status Survey show that around 75% of the youth are unemployed. Therefore, government must solve these challenges in order to reduce and control the youth violence in the community.

In conclusion, it is obvious that youth involvement in violence acts nowadays is becoming a cause for concern as some of them have turned to bones in the flesh of their various communities. Therefore, without active involvement of parents, community leaders and governments nothing tangible can be done to curb this rampant increase in violence kindled by youth in our community. Hence, I suggest every sector of the community should take their responsibility accordingly, so that we can have lasting peace in our society.

By Khadar Jama Dahir
khadarjama08@gmail.com