Business View Caribbean | October 2022

8 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 9, ISSUE 10 mental health issues, lacked the capacity to control their anger and had poor conflict resolution skills. “Recently there has been growing concern in the Caribbean regarding youth, socialization and development . . . Some young people are often associated with negative consequences such as illiteracy, drugs and violence. So we are looking at the whole ‘block’ culture and what these subcultures are teaching our young people. “While numbers suggest that the minority of these young people are engaging in antisocial acts, this minority tends to be highly-profiled, leading to fear among the general society. This is something we have seen in the past few months where a minority of our young people were involved in gun warfare and that minority tormented an entire country. It led to a public outcry of people afraid to leave home,” he said. “Factors such as poor social competence, low academic achievement . . . and poverty increase individuals’ risk of violence. “This is what we are trying to prevent with our young people in terms of offering them some form of social competency, teaching them the social skills they will need such as self esteem building, anger management, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and helping them to attain some level of academic achievement.” Clarke said that students from 19 of the island’s 20 public secondary schools participated in the survey which engaged a total of 6 337 participants. He said the study showed that 31 per cent (1950) of the students indicated they had mental health concerns, 25 percent (1 566) had weak conflict resolution skills and 47 per cent (2 956) had anger management problems. (SZB)