THE SHOCKING murder of a young boy in Limassol on Tuesday has stunned us all into disbelief and anger. Over the past month, we have watched with growing concern our society facing a gathering wave of criminality – often random – fuelled by a terrifying rise in drug abuse.
We have got used to (if not accepted) the regular muggings, bank robberies and break-ins into homes and cars, and we have wearily come to expect the next overdose death in a country where hard drugs once did not exist. However, the savage, unprovoked stabbing of a young boy in broad daylight by a 29-year-old man with a history of drug abuse and psychological problems is something that even the most hardened of societies cannot begin to understand.
The risk of such attacks can never be eliminated. Unbalanced individuals exist in every society, and there is no Big Brother solution that can track every deranged (or potentially deranged) individual at every moment of the day. Psychiatric treatment and welfare services aim at the eventual reintegration of most cases into society. Cases still abound across Europe where the wrong assessment was made, with tragic consequences, overshadowing the successful treatment of the vast majority of cases.
With details surrounding the specific case still sketchy, no specific conclusions can be drawn. There are, however, broader problems thrown into the spotlight by the issues at play in this week’s tragedy. Police say the man was a known drug user who had had frequent run-ins with the law. Whatever the circumstances of this particular case, it remains a problem that drug users are punished by the criminal law with insufficient focus on offering treatment.
Often an arrest is the only opportunity for a user to come into contact with treatment that can give them a lifeline back to normal life. Yet the prison has no clinic (though plans are in the pipeline), while too many addicts are still being sent to jail instead of being placed in controlled rehabilitation. Jail without treatment will simply return an unreformed criminal onto the streets, whereas a spell in rehabilitation gives an opportunity for reintegration into society.
Moreover, the man arrested on Tuesday was known to be suffering from psychosis and had twice been treated at the psychiatric unit. Only a full inquiry will be able to judge whether errors of judgement were made by the social services and the people treating him, but it remains a fact that the Welfare Department is woefully understaffed and dangerously stretched in dealing with increasing numbers of problem cases.
Effectively, staffing levels remain where they were at a time when society was radically different from what it has become, when there was still a family safety net that looked after and protected those who had difficulty coping with the pressures of daily life.
That society has been shattered. Broken homes, violence and drug abuse are disturbingly common in the Cyprus of today. Just as police and the penal system need to adapt to a new criminality, so the Welfare Department must be given the resources and the tools to be able to face the depressing circumstances of today.
