A number of mentoring programmes are helping change the behaviour of teenage offenders
Tracey Farren
The people of Eersterus, near Pretoria, were disgusted when David*, a 15-year-old gangster found guilty of assault, was allowed to do community service at the local life-skills training and counselling centre.
After three months of group training and special time, his 24-year- old mentor at the centre sensed a potential breakthrough. The National Youth Development Outreach Centre asked the courts to redivert David to their Adolescent Development Programme. His mentor was right. Something monumental shifted within David, until one night he found himself thrown out of his home because he refused to earn money through crime.
Stranded on the street at 2am, it would have been easy for him to turn to his gang buddies. But this time David chose to knock on the door of his mentor instead.
Eight months later he is back at home. After intense consultation and counselling, David’s mother continues to run her shebeen, but no longer demands drug money from her son.
The new Juvenile Justice Bill, set to become law in May or June this year, gives children a chance to backtrack after their first foray into crime.
The Bill gives them the chance to pay penance through community service and learn life skills that carry them away from crime. The field of diversion is rapidly expanding and NGOs and government departments are answering community calls for positive role models in environments where they are scarce.
Buyi Imbambo of the United Nation’s Child Justice Project says that communal structures to “hold” growing children have been sabotaged by apartheid and relentless poverty. About six years ago she heeded the call by Inanda residents (near Durban) to recruit older children to act as mentors and guides to troubled children in the gang-ridden township.
South Africa’s first mentoring programme was born when teenagers were trained to counsel younger charges and support them through their struggles with their parents, their schools and local gangs.
The National Youth Development Outreach Centre sought to replicate the success of the Inanda project. The centre’s programme coordinator, Renee Botha, says that awareness has since spread to the other four life centres around the country, which now recognise mentors as critical links between the centres and families. In the meantime the National Institute for Crime Prevention and Reintegration of Offenders (Nicro) has added a mentoring component to its journey programme, which takes youths at risk through rites of passage in the wild.
A year-old organisation called Big Brothers Big Sisters South Africa recruits, trains and supervises mentors for the children, so once they have been to the bush, revisited their past and planned for their future, they are matched with an older person who meets them once a week for a year. The large majority of the organisation’s recruits are community-minded women who are already involved in community development organisations. Big Brothers Big Sisters South Africa had to mount campaigns asking the question: “Where have all the men gone?” on behalf of its “littles” who, says coordinator Tania Moodley, often need to be shown alternative ways of being a man.
Thirteen graduates of Nicro’s life-skills course, its Youth Empowerment Scheme, have completed a programme with the University of the Western Cape’s Diversion into Music Education project (Dime). Julia Sloth-Nielson, a lawyer who has been instrumental in the reframing of juvenile justice, started up Dime last year. Children at risk meet weekly with hand-picked psychology, social work and law students who hail from Khayelitsha the children’s home town. On Fridays they take part in a marimba drumming session, the goal being, says university psychologist Vuyisile Mathitli, to change the children’s behaviour through life skills, music and mentoring. Mathitli and a fellow psychologist train the mentors in child development before they begin but, he says, training continues as mentors explore the unique problems that may contribute to that child reoffending.
Usiko, the organisation started by criminologist Don Pinnock (author of the book, Gangs, Rituals and Rites of Passage) works inside the community of Bonteheuwel, Cape Town. It took several months to build relationships within the community, presenting its ideas to church, school and sports groupings until, says Nic Fine, “we got to the men we wanted to get to”. Last year it trained 15 men aged 19 to 62 and matched them with 21 boys identified by their parents and teachers as being at risk.
While Fine says that there is a place for all kinds of mentoring, theirs is very much group-based. Usiko’s children have one-on-one meetings with their mentors in a group setting. There may be “one bad egg” among 20 mentors, says Fine, and the group format protects both the parties from potential abuse. Their mentoring, he says, is part of a developing partnership with the community and other organisations working within it. Usiko works closely with the local Department of Community Development and a cooperative called Change Moves. All three organisations deal with schools development, community leadership and youths at risk. Fine says that Usiko hopes to take community members into staff positions during the year and in its third year the organisation will “look at stepping away” and letting local residents take over.
International Big Brothers Big Sisters research shows that children who are lucky enough to be “matched” with someone special are 52% more likely to stay in school, 46% less likely to do drugs and 32% less likely to engage in violence. The intangibles of having a mentor who is both firm and compassionate and who, as Fine puts it, “is able to share themselves authentically” and provide a positive picture of what life can be like, are bound to have a powerful, measurable effect on South Africa’s troubled youth.
* Name has been changed