Summer vacations began a few days ago. During the holiday season the number-one problem for parents is how to organize their children’s leisure activities. The police are urging them to send their kids to school-sponsored holiday camps or to stay with relatives in the country so that they will have adult supervision. Idleness and too much freedom lead many children to engage in risky activities or even to commit crimes. The police say that in the past four years juvenile delinquency in Ukraine has dropped by 10 percent and the number of serious crimes (murders, thefts, robberies) by 16.5 percent.
In order to continue this trend, policemen are establishing partnership relations with teenagers: last May police visited schools in various regions of Ukraine, organized visits to police stations and pretrial jails, and showed youngsters the way law-enforcement agencies work. They also took teenagers who are under police surveillance on visits to detention centers. The children were interviewed by psychologists before and after the visit to jail, and most of them said they would do their utmost to keep clear of those kinds of places. The policemen also tried to persuade the teenagers that they are their friends and advisors, not their enemies.
"Despite some positive changes, we still have a lot of problems. Our first priority is to reduce the number of homeless children, because they are the ones who most often commit robberies, muggings, and thefts of public and private property. In the past four months about 24,000 teenagers, including approximately 6,000 street kids, have been arrested for various offenses," said Tetiana Bakhtiarova, chief of the Criminal Police Department for Juvenile Delinquency.
"Those who most often end up on the street are children from low- income and problem families, who leave home because of cruelty and violence in the family, as well as boarding-school pupils who cannot accept the lifestyle there. Law- enforcement bodies have now brought to administrative justice about 12,000 parents, and roughly 1,000 of them have been stripped of their parental rights. While we can still exert some pressure on parents and provide social and psychological assistance to children, it is much more difficult to do this with respect to those who live in boarding school," Bakhtiarova explained.
Inmates of orphanages, many of whom are runaways, most often break the law. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, about 2,000 children, not just orphans, have been reported missing to law-enforcement agencies. Another 105 children are being sought, and almost half of them have been on the run for several years.
Another problem that law- enforcement agencies are tackling is alcohol abuse among teenagers. As a rule, children drink alcohol when they do not have adult supervision. Drunkenness often leads children to commit offenses. So law-enforcement officers tell parents repeatedly: monitor your children’s leisure activities all the time, especially during vacations. Bakhtiarova maintains that effective results are impossible unless a law is passed to restrict the sale of malt beverages to minors. This applies above all to beer, which teenagers consume most often.
But if this law works the way the law banning smoking in public places is being enforced (almost nobody obeys it), it will hardly improve matters. In an effort to curb youth drinking, police carried out raids in every region of Ukraine between May 1 and 14. During this period 5,500 teenagers were arrested, half of them for drinking alcohol and about 600 for committing various crimes, especially thefts.
To keep children away from a life of crime, experts advise parents to schedule their leisure time down to the last minute. If children stay home alone, it is a good idea to phone them throughout the day to make sure they are all right.
INCIDENTALLY
Interfax-Ukraine quotes Yurii Pavlenko, Ukraine’s Minister for Families, Youth and Sport, as saying that his ministry and the Prosecutor-General’s Office are monitoring how the law on providing children with proper and safe holiday facilities is being observed. According to the minister, there are plans to send 2.5 million school- age children to holiday camps this summer. The regions report that children will be placed in approximately 18,000 children’s recreation facilities, including 16,000 day camps, 759 full-time facilities, and 90 sanatorium-type institutions. The provision of holiday opportunities to socially-vulnerable children is also being monitored. Visits to children’s holiday facilities are planned for 92 percent of orphans and children deprived of parental guardianship. It is expected that 56 percent of children from large and low-income families will be sent to such facilities.
