IN AN INTERVIEW more than 15 years ago, criminologist and then Prisons Director Andreas Kapardis predicted that juvenile crime would become a major problem for Cyprus in the future.
His words have come back to haunt in recent weeks during a spate of youth-related crimes – in all four major towns – and as official figures revealed double and triple increases in the numbers of young offenders over the past two years.
Now a professor at the University of Cyprus, Kapardis, who has just handed the Education Minister a 150-page report on juvenile crime – compiled with six other academics – says of his prophetic words: “It was largely predictable. The signs were already there.”
Although he and other experts in the field say the situation is not yet out of control, the upsurge in youth crime was worrying enough to warrant immediate action.
Ernie Papacosta, an educational psychologist at the Education Ministry, said the new report was aimed at stemming the upturn in youth crime before it got out of hand.
“There is a need but we don’t have such a great problem in comparison to other EU countries, although the problems are increasing so we do need to take some steps,” she said. “There are more incidents and it is worrying us,”
Papacostas said.
The new report covered many aspects of the problem from family to schools and contains practical suggestion and measures, she said.
“We can’t pinpoint one single reason for the cause. We have to tackle it on many levels,” she said.
“Cyprus is becoming more multicultural and we have different expectations of the school system and we have to educate our educators to treat the problems differently.”
People often blame “society as a whole” for juvenile crime but society is nothing more than a group made up of people who have been shaped by parents, educators, and often the Church, so essentially the buck stops there.
As the old Jesuit saying goes: “Give me a child…until he is seven, and I will give you the man”.
Kapardis said part of the problem was that traditional authority figures like the priest, the teacher and the police officer, and parents to an extent, have been eroded.
“They no longer serve as good role models,” he said. “What you find is people flouting the law, whether it’s tax evasion or traffic lights. Respect for the law is going out the window, if we don’t like the particular law. There is an attitude that the law is something you bend if you have connections. This is becoming more widespread among young people because it’s what they see going on around them. The message is that to be law abiding you must be an idiot.”
Kapardis said urbanisation combined with increased anonymity plus globalisation and increased mobility contributed to the changes and the emergence of the egocentric, or ‘me, me, me’ generation.
“I would say the changes have been too fast for this society to adapt. At the same time for decades there was no strategy on how to best deal with violence in society,” he said.
Nicos Vitsiades, the president of the Pancyprian Parents Association said violence was now widely seen as an appropriate method for solving a problem, both locally and internationally.
“We talk about justice and a fairer society, but in reality we do not practise it. This contributes to the problem of the behaviour of younger people nowadays,” he said.
Antigone Ioannidou of the Federation of Student Unions POFEN said young people get no support from society “either from family or school”.
“They want to be listened to and taken seriously. Most of the time they’re told they are too young to know,” Ioannidou said.
“Young people feel excluded from society. Often they can do more than they are given credit for,” she said.
Vitsiades said it was far too difficult to pinpoint one thing that could be said to be the root cause of why children to go off the rails.
Parents were definitely a major factor however, and for him, the place to start.
“Parents don’t speak to their children enough,” he said. “They are always busy. They have to realise that handing money to their children does not make up for not spending time with them.”
Vitsiades said the association had tried hard to run workshops and seminars to educate parents. “Unfortunately the majority of parents do not respond. Although they know there are problems, to them it’s someone else’s problem,” he said.
He said many parents mistakenly believe that because problems such as drugs and vandalism have not touched them personally, what’s happening in society has nothing to do with them. “They have to realise that no one can ever say with certainty that their child will never do drugs,” he said.
And if something does happen with their child, they will invariably blame someone else, Vitsiades said.
The educational system also has to learn to respond correctly to young people and to create not clones “but future citizens that do not judge other people by their social status, their colour, religion or gender”, he added.
Schools themselves often took a heavy toll on children in terms of the amount of competition they face and pressure that’s put on them by parents and teachers to perform in exams.
“This causes them a lot of stress, and school failure, if it’s not handled properly can lead to social exclusion,” Vitsiades said.
This was confirmed by a state secondary teacher who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The teacher said the problem often started when children enter secondary school and some find it hard to keep up.
“They start becoming disinterested and disruptive because they are bored. They can’t follow the lessons,” the teacher said.
Once a child is labelled by a teacher as disruptive, it goes on from there and she said some of her colleagues have very bad relationships with the children.
“Some are just too authoritarian and boss the children around or insult them. It’s then easy for an explosive situation to develop. Labelling is a big problem,” the teacher said.
Although teachers have been receiving more training in recent years and were becoming more sensitive “there are others who think being sensitive is stupid” she added.
“But in my experience, everyone who knows how to talk to the kids, doesn’t have any problems with them. Occasionally you will come across a really difficult one but it’s rare,” said the teacher.
She also spoke of a lack of consistency in schools when it came to rules.
Some pupils are punished for having long hair but not punished for smoking. Children with long hair, if they have good grades, are not punished while the ‘bad student’ will be picked on for the same thing. “They pick on the kids a lot over their appearance because it’s much easier than tackling the real problems behind the children’s behaviour,” she said.
One 20-year-old, Adonis Christodoulou, who found himself labelled ‘trouble’ at school, said living in society should not only be about teaching obedience but also about developing common sense.
Admitting he was somewhat argumentative, Christodoulou said when he was at school, the majority of his teachers refused to engage him in discussion in class.
“Some were open minded but the others just want you to shut up and do as they say,” he said.
“I was labelled as a bad guy. I had long hair and I didn’t shave often. I understand the rules about uniforms but there was no logic to their complaints about my hair,” he said.
Asked whether he thought at all about a life of crime, having been labelled in this way, he replied he hadn’t because his parents had taught him how to think critically. “From preschool right up until you finish the army it’s all about teaching you how to obey,” he said.
He said he believed that was why so many Cypriots liked to bend the rules on the road and in other areas to see how much they can get away with without getting caught. “It’s a kind of rebelling against the system,” he said.
Kapardis, who also chairs the committee on school violence, agreed the educational system in Cyprus was “not about thinking, or managing, or teamwork”.
“One major weakness of our society is we don’t produce leaders because the way our educational system works does not favour the creation of leaders,” he said.
He also dismissed the hysteria over drugs in schools, saying a study showed it was very low, if not the lowest, in comparison to other countries. “I think people like to blame something when there is a crisis. They look for scapegoats,” he said but he did add that he was worried about the prevalence of alcohol abuse and smoking, which he said were precursors to moving into soft drugs.
Despite the problems, Kapardis said the situation was not yet irreversible. A survey among new EU member states put Cyprus top for family bonds.
“We are still holding strong as a community. We need to go back and instil values in our young people then we will have the kind of behaviour we want,” he said. “I see hope. The future belongs to us. We just have to shape it.”
