Department of Youth Services is Critical in Gang Intervention
The Department of Youth Services is critical in providing the kind of assistance that is needed to intervene in the lives of young men who choose a life of crime. DYS has been working closely with the Leadership Intervention Unit to help these at-risk youths. This afternoon, Director Kevin Cadle announced that a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to establish community groups to assist with violence reduction.
Kevin Cadle, Ag. Director, Department of Youth Services
“This is going to take a lot of work and it’s nothing easy and I am hoping that everybody in the country could participate in what we want to do. It must be a collaborative effort. While it’s legislative, it’s also very programmatic and the issue is very psychosocial in nature, whereby we have young men basically killing each other and we must come up with creative and innovative ways of trying to curb crime and violence in our country. In terms of the LIU and the Department of Youth Services, one of the most effective tools that we recognize that needs to happen is that we need to transform the communities where our young people are coming from who are susceptible, especially to crime and violence. And with that, what we’re going to do and we have already signed an MOU with UNHCR and that is to create community committees on violence reduction. We’ll be utilizing twenty persons from each of the violent communities and interject violence interrupters training in those persons, as well as counseling skills, mentoring skills and mediation skills, so that people within the communities would be able to, peer to peer, be able to assist each other and to help each other. We also want to work directly with the females and the family members in those families and to be able to partake in training with them so that they could better assist themselves.”