Kevin Cadle, Director, Department of Youth Services
"I know that you heard some gang members have even said today that they even wanted to call a press conference. I do not condone gang members getting together for any press conference, because we don't want to hear about no gang members. We are Belizeans and so if you are saying that you want to get out of the gangs and do something different, then that's okay, but if you want to say that you are a gang member in a gang, then I think you need to go to KOLBE Foundation. Clear and plain as that. That's just how much I am really tired of what is taking place. It's getting worse. So, from our point of view it has to be multi-sectorial and it has to be an approach that is two ways. It has to be legislative. What we need to do legislative wise, is that we need to have tougher laws to deal especially with gangs and one of the things that I was speaking to the commissioner this morning about is that we need to start initiating the gang law. We need to ensure that for those people who do not want to abide by the norms of society that they need to go and spend time in prison. no short time, but long-term sentences and so programmatically what we are saying is we need to change the education law, that's the first one. The law for young people to say that they no longer want to go to school at 14 has to change. We want to bring that up to 18 years old. If you have a person with mandatory education being at the age of requirement at age of 18, then what we are saying is those people at the age of 14 and 18 who are not going to school will need to go to Mountain Pine Ridge where we officially want to launch back the cadet program. We need to work within the communities and it's going to be at several different levels, we not just only need to work with the gang members which were the interventions that were taking place - we need to work with the families. We need to work with the women, we need to work with the children, we need to work with the community on a whole. There is a lot of trauma in those communities, there is a lot of strength also in those communities from a perspective model. We have a lot of issues in terms of grief and loss, we have issues of separational loss with families with women being the head of the homes and so we need to start work in our community. What we are seeing going on in our society is just signs that we need to start fixing the problems and so it is going to take a lot of fix. It's not going to take a quick fix, it's not going to take a band-aid effect, this is reprogramming of our entire cultural way of thinking."