Gang violence related to increased lack of caring
Gang violence is just one product of a breakdown of caring for other people, says Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner, a visiting psychologist. The social fabric was being destroyed by unemployment, neglect of children and family life, and ignorance by those in power, said Professor Bronfenbrenner, who is professor of human development and family studies, and of psychology at Cornell University, New York. He is in Christchurch for the second Early Childhood Care and Development convention. People widely recognised that technological power threatened to destroy the physical environment, he said. "Mine is a a parallel thesis. We now have the power to destroy the social fabric, and destroy the conditions which human beings need to flourish.” Professor Bronfenbrenner saw the breakdown in families and communities, and the growth of unemployment as making people indifferent to the needs of others. This was carried further by an education system from which people emerged “illiterate in human relations.”
He linked increases in g delinquency and street violence with a big rise in the number of mothers, especially those with young children, entering the work-force, the high incidence of single-parent families and a “rocket-like rise” in the numbers of unwed mothers. These trends would continue as long as the people in power failed, through a narrow range of experience, to understand the plight of the sick, the old, the lonely and the unemployed, said Professor Bronfenbrenner. The answers lay in child care and teaching children to feel for others. “What is needed is a hard-headed look at what happens to the family,” he said. Professor Bronfenbrenner advocated that people should work three-quarters of the time they worked at present. This would provide more jobs and increased time for parents to devote to their children. “About the worst thing that can happen to a child is to have the breadwinner unemployed. Another thing is to have no challenging work for (he young — that is death.” He called for education of children from an early
age in human relations and responsibility, “They should visit old people and experience caring for animals and plants.” Professor Bronfenbrenner said this curriculum could begin with children aged two and three and was more essential for boys than girls. Women tended to have more insight into the problems than men, but men generally held the power.
Professor Bronfenbrenner said he knew little of specific New Zealand prolems, but it was clear that school vandalism and violence was on the rise. “I can see from reading your newspapers that you are not immune to American diesases. They are growing here, using the same soil — unemployment, a lack of substitute child-care and so on.”
However, New Zealand had some important strengths, a bicultural society, which was taken very seriously at preschool and primary school level. Concern for the aged and other facets of the Maori culture were available for New Zealanders to draw on, he said.
“Your society lacks good solid data so you can monitor what, is happening,” said Professor Bronfenbrenner, “Research should be done into the incidence of children from single-parent families and the amount of child-care available. This break-down in social fabric was not irreversible,” he said. The question now was how much vandalism and street violence could be taken before systems failed to work?
Professor Bmofenbrenner said people generally saw the source of social problems, but thought it would just go away. Two kinds of solutions were emerging, he said. One was strong law and order, a “don’t let him get away with it,” syndrome which filled the jails. The other was a reliance on belief systems to define clearly right and wrong by which to live. This was seen in the increase of cults, said Professor Bronfenbrenner. “Both these are terrifying politically. They tend to fuse the forces of recreation,” he said, “and gave rise to bigotry and intolerance.”
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Press, 22 August 1979, Page 13
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647Gang violence related to increased lack of caring Press, 22 August 1979, Page 13
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