SCPD head: Angry youth in search of love and affection
As Supreme Counselling for Personal Development (SCPD) carried out its work with at-risk youth in 2017, a major issue which kept surfacing was that of displaced anger and aggression, exhibited by quite a number of the school aged students, passing through the programme.
Shawn Clarke, CEO of Supreme Counselling for Personal Development (SCPD), revealed the above, in a recent interview with The Barbados Advocate, as he reflected on the past year and the work done by Supreme Counselling, which seeks to bring about holistic change in the lives of troubled youth, by teaching them valuable life skills, whilst placing a heavy focus on self-development and awareness, mentoring and bullying prevention.
“What we have is a group of young people or a number of young people who are extremely angry and because of that, they are taking their anger out at school, whether it be on teachers, whether it be on their peers. But when you look into it, when you dissect the whole thing, when you start to talk to them about the reason or the source of their anger, you realise that it is really displaced anger. They are angry because something in the home is not working the way it should; mommy and daddy are always quarrelling and fighting with each other; they really don’t hear any loving words coming from within their households; nobody says to me as a young lady that I am pretty; nobody says to me congratulations, that I have done well,” Clarke pointed out.
“So you have the young people that are not getting the treatment and the love and the affection that they need from in the household and they get extremely angry and then, unfortunately, the school seems to be the playground where their anger is exhibited,” he added.
Clarke mentioned that while there were other students passing through the programme with additional pressing issues that needed a greater intervention, overall, the issue of anger and aggression was the one to be tackled in a major way.
“We found some young people with some other psychological issues that needed definitely to be addressed and to be addressed quickly. There were one or two young people that we did refer to the Psychiatric Hospital to get psychiatric attention, because we believed that was best in those given situations. But all in all, the problem virtually remains the same and a lot of it stems from anger, from children not getting the affection that they need to get from their parents,” Clarke maintained. (RSM)