The Tribune

By RUPERT MISSICK Jr

THERE are very few people in Bahamas today who know more or even as much about the efforts to retrain and re-socialise the nation’s youth than Jeffrey Lloyd.

Mr Lloyd served as executive director of the YEAST (Youth Empowerment And Skills Training) Institute, an organisation that he founded in the late 90s under the auspices of the Catholic Archdiocese of Nassau to help rescue at-risk males from a cycle of violence, poverty and failure.

Before it was suddenly de-funded by the government at dawn of the global financial crisis of 2008, YEAST had at least 1,000 young Bahamian men pass through its programme and boasted a success rate of 87 per cent.

YEAST also became an invaluable resource to the parents of these young men as there was an auxiliary component to the programme which offered parenting classes to mothers and fathers eager to learn how best to raise their troubled sons.

It seems impossible for a man like Mr Lloyd, one brimming with optimism and passion, to see the closure of the programme as anything more than a temporary setback.

Even today, he is investigating the possibility of re-starting the institute but says there is a need to broaden the scope of its mission.

Mr Lloyd admitted that he fell into the trap, as many social scientists and social commentators in the country did at the time, of believing that if society was able to “correct the male” then the social dislocation of Bahamians would be corrected as well.

“Despite the fact that there needs to be some concentrated effort on the male it cannot be to the exclusion of understanding, at the same time, the female. Today we realise that the nine-month gestation period inside the female has implications into old age. That is today the predictor of the kind of potential diseases you may have, the issue of cognitive development, and the issue of what kind of mental challenges you have.

“We don’t have the luxury any more as we may have had in the past to believe, and I certainly believed it when I started YEAST in 1997, lets deal with the man. If we get the boy straight, society is going to be ordered and aligned. Not necessarily so,” Mr Lloyd said.

If the only thing one knows about the make-up of the modern Bahamian family is that over the past 40 years, the percentage of births to unwed mothers in the Bahamas has escalated from 29 per cent in 1970 to 59 per cent in 2010, then the significance of Mr Lloyd’s statement is obvious.

The male-led households and extended families of his generation simply do not exist today as they did back then. In addition, he points out that when it comes to healing the hurt and anger in a society, women cannot be left out of the equation as they often start from a position of vulnerability and deficit to begin with.

“They are in many societies still seen as chattel, property. They are in many countries including our own, discriminated against,” he said.

However, he said that males in the modern Bahamas lack the same restrictive dimensions and paradigms as their female counterparts.

As such, Mr Lloyd said, there is a need for some kind of right of passage for Bahamian boys that will signal for them a transition into the mind-set and responsibilities of manhood, in the way a girl’s body does naturally.

“That is why in the older societies, the Asian and African societies, they did something that was unique and powerful. They took the boy through a right of passage and the right of passage was designed to introduce the young man to himself. This is something that nature didn’t do. The right of passage was a time of great challenge. In modern western societies, that right of passage – in some instances – has been going to war,” he said.

Deacon Lloyd said the 21st century Bahamas lacks the kind of right of passage once represented by “The Contract” (a farm labour programme established on March 16, 1943 by the governments of the Bahamas and the United States of America) and the tradition of a boy being sent off to learn a trade at 14 and 15, that existed several generations ago.

“There has not been a kind of gurukula – school of the masters – that taught the young boy what it means to be a man. As a result this boy has been a loose cannon. He has been trained by his parents to believe that housework is women’s work, you don’t have to show emotions and if you do you are a punk, a sissy.

“He’s been taught how to hold his liquor, has been taught that being a man is having plenty sweethearts, plenty outside children, that women are to be subjugated, that you slap them down and tell them what to do. All of these are contaminated, poisonous and toxic understandings of what it means to be a man,” Mr Lloyd said.

It is no small thing that both males and females in our society receive their first lesson in conflict resolution at the end of a belt or switch from their parents.

Mr Lloyd blames this fact – and the resulting effect of children who learn that interpersonal roadblocks can be broken down by violence – on a literal and legalistic misinterpretation of the Bible.

“We have learned that you spare the rod, you spoil the child. What nonsense! We misunderstood what they were expressing in the Bible. We took that legalistic and literal interpretation to mean the rod of correction and that if you ever neglected to discipline your children that you were in fact encouraging them to be wayward, loose, ill mannered and so forth. Nonsense!

“This kind of brutalisation of our people over many decades manifest today where our young men and our young women have no patience, not to mention that they have certain cognitive deficits, they have no patience to resolve issues sensibly,” Mr Lloyd said.

In the fight against crime and the effort to change the direction and mentality of the nation’s youth, YEAST was possibly the most high profile and regrettable casualty of the global financial crisis.

While Mr Lloyd is hard pressed to say that he would have done things differently if faced with the same intimidating and extraordinary circumstance of economic catastrophe in this country, it is undeniable that YEAST’s footprint in the nation’s war on crime is missed.

“In those 13 years we took boys who were in prison, the ones who had been kicked out of the public schools, those whose parents had given up hope, we took 1,000 of them in 13 years and we redeemed 87 per cent. We considered that to be successful.

“The people in the STRIVE programme in California, in New York, said that if they could get 25 per cent success they would have considered their programme to be successful.

“We tried to tell them if you needed to reduce the programme, if you need to cut back the programme do so, just don’t cut it out,” he said.

Tomorrow: The McCabe Project features lawyer and activist Paul Moss on conditions at Her Majesty’s Prison, the judiciary and education system.