Claudine Housen, Staff Reporter
WESTERN BUREAU
THE JAMAICA Association of Guidance Counsellors in Education (JAGCE) has launched a bid to reduce violence in the nation's schools.
The JAGCE, under its mandate of 'Professional Counsellor, Agent of Change', introduced the Transforming Acting-Out Behaviours (TAB) programme at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort, in Montego Bay, on Tuesday.
Launched under the theme: 'Violence Prevention and Positive Attitude Formation in Selected Jamaican Schools', TAB is a pilot programme geared towards behaviour change through the modelling appropriate responses.
MORAL AND VALUES
"Jamaica has got to the stage where we are having a landslide as it were, in moral and values where in recent times we find that there are some persons who act out their anger by killing, fighting, bullying and raping," said JAGCE president, Dr. Grace Kelly. "If they are made aware of ways of dealing with their emotions they would be in a better position to control themselves (and), based on my experience with TAB, I believe it can make a difference."
Dr. Kelly's comments come amidst recent reports of violent crimes against children in which young girls were brutally raped and killed.
Acknowledging that TAB was not the first programme geared towards violence in schools, and probably not the last, Dr. Kelly was undaunted by the apparent slow change resulting from other programmes.
INNER-CITY DISTRICTS
"I have worked with the TAB project. It was developed in the United States by Dr. Lenore Brantley and was piloted in one of the worst inner-city districts in the United States," she said.
"I have seen the evidence of change in the behavioural patterns of the children ... We expect that after our first series we will see a decrease and on a wide scale I would think that within the next five to six years you will see a tremendous reduction in crime and violence if the project is implemented and sustained."
Expected to become a part of the guidance curriculum in schools, the project will focus on children in the early stages of development from the age of six to 13 and will, therefore, cover infant, primary and junior high schools up to grade nine. Thirty schools, across the island, have already been selected to run pilots in January.
