Belize, 18th June 2016

Editor Amandala

Dear Editor,

It is a great disappointment to hear that a 15-year- old minor is a suspect to a police investigation in a shooting incident. To make matters worse, it involves a local police officer and three other civilians, in broad daylight steps away from the entrance of the Queen Street Police station.

So what does this mean? Children have no respect for our law? Belize is a small country; these types of things should not be tolerated. Months ago the Commissioner of the Police Department set a night curfew for the kids which was a good thing to do because this way they are out of the streets at nights.

Problem starts when UNICEF and other NGO’s start defending the rights of a child, which can even allow children to be out as late as they want, and decide which hand gun to use for the shooting later that night.

That was what they wanted us to understand? A kid that late should be watching cartoons, or his/ her parents should be reading them a bedtime story. Where are the parents? Dancing, while son is out with friends?

At 15 I was about to graduate from high school and was thinking about CXC, not about whom to shoot. The parents are the ones to blame for tolerating so much from kids.

A 15-year-old shooting a gun should be sent away, maybe to a police farm, far out into the jungles of Pine Ridge. Let him go work and earn his food the hard way. If he gets caught he might end up receiving a long sentence, and be at the prison in Hattieville. The beauty is, he does not have to work for food, because he gets three meals a day, at the local poor Belizean taxpayers’ expense.

In the end, parents are the ones to blame; they don’t take responsibility for their kids’ behavior. With corporal punishment, these kids would be in school learning to do good rather than wasting their lives and doing harm to others on the streets, which later affects the image of the entire country.

I end by advising parents: educate your kids. You’re the adults; have them respect you in order for them to respect others, LEARNING STARTS AT HOME. Let’s make Belize a better place. It benefits us all.

Sincerely,

Elsa R. Gonzalez