Teenage pregnancy, adult apathy
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Teenage-pregnancy-adult-apathy-244804561.html
By Ralph Maraj
Story Created: Feb 10, 2014 at 8:42 PM ECT
Story Updated: Feb 10, 2014 at 8:42 PM ECT
The most explosive information about our society surfaced recently. In answering a question in Parliament, the Education Minister easily pulled statistics revealing that every year in our small population of 1.3 million, over 2,500 teenage girls become pregnant; the majority of these unfortunate girls drop out of school; by age 19, over 1,000 girls in this country already have four children; and 50 per cent of mothers in Trinidad and Tobago are single parents. If you want any evidence of a coming implosion, this is it.
But we learn of this alarming situation by chance. This is equally frightening. Always we have heard about this, but only now are we learning of the extent of the problem. For years officialdom knew but no public official thought it critical enough to ring alarm bells.
Prime ministers and their ministers of education, social development, culture and gender affairs; permanent secretaries of these ministries; presidents of the republic; religious leaders of this country for the past 40 years when we first started to learn of this problem; academics, analysts, commentators; they all stand condemned for having done nothing to arrest this powder keg building at the heart of our society, producing offspring who can easily become victims of dysfunctionality, criminality and general deviancy.
Nothing was done when it was manageable, and still nothing was done when it exploded into an epidemic. We know of nothing that governments, past and present, have been doing about it. Such irresponsibility of our “validating elites”! The entire adult establishment stands condemned. We are responsible for the culture that celebrates permissiveness, promiscuity and male unscrupulousness and produces inadequate parenting, declining community...