RALPH CHEN, Entrepreneur, financial planner and civic and consumer affairsadvocate:
... Crime is a symptom of the real problem which is a lack of economic opportunity and social decay ... What I have been proposing is (that) bigger companies allocate 10 per cent of their profit perhaps for the next five years to a special fund dedicated to treating three things:
1) Fighting crime and violence
2) Improving education and
3) Providing resources for a social equity fund which will help the persons in the lowest socio economic (bracket), the so-called sufferers, to improve their conditions through a combination of programmes.
WANTED: COMMISSION TO HOLD PUBLIC OFFICIALS ACCOUNTABLE
DAVID KEELING, Farquharson Institute of Public Affairs: The Farquharson Institute took a commission to the governor-general on April 14, requesting him, petitioning him, to establish a commission to look into the problem and to empower that commission to have particular powers to establish a prosecutor to deal specifically with elected officials ... The other powers this commission would have would be to look into various other forms of malfeasance.
PROPER MENTORING OF TEENAGED MOTHERS AND FATHERS
JEAN SAMUELS: ... I would like to see proper parenting of the teenage mothers and fathers because they are children themselves and they cannot grow up their children. That is part of why we have so much crime and violence. Some children are not yet born, and their fathers are gunmen ... When they (are) born, the parents are telling them that the father was a gunman. They have this in their minds and they take it out on society. Some say that my father was a gunman so I can turn a gunman too.
CHILD-CENTRED LEARNING PROGRAMMES NEEDED
JENNIE JONES: ... I think there is a sense in which we don't have child-centered learning, a sense in which we contribute to the underachievement of our children ... I am sure it has improved in many ways, but you don't learn when you are intimidated, when you are frightened, when you are expected to achieve very little, when you have low self esteem ... There have been comments about over testing our children, constantly testing them rather than approaching them as having enormous potential, not necessarily in all the academic areas. So that they come out of school with that inability conflict. And I wonder sometimes from feedback I have had from parents and so on, whether our teachers have an attitude of blame toward the parents rather than supporting them.
SET UP A COMMITTEE TO VET LYRICS FOR SONGS
AUDIENCE MEMBER: ... When the lyrical contents of songs are not vetted (and some) are not banned ... The result is like what we saw earlier (in May) where we saw a six-year-old was raped and viciously killed. Why don't the society put in place a vetting committee for the musical lyrics?
