Destruction looms – Too many young men lost

Walter Barrett

A chaplain at Her Majesty’s Prison Walter Barrett has lamented that a number of young men in the territory have lost their way, adding that they are ending up in prison because they lack the benefit of positive role models.

“One of the things we look around and we see is that a lot of our men have lost their focus; they have lost their way; they do not know what manhood is. They get their examples from the media and from society and from all the wrong places,” he said.

That reality, Barrett cautioned, is likely to cause destruction in the territory. “When you have a male that is confused about his purpose, then you have a community that is doomed to destruction financially, socially – in every facet of relationship,” he further reasoned this month during the Umoja radio programme hosted by Cromwell Smith.

Barrett, who also is a pastor at New Life Baptist Church, related his experience with men at the prison. “Where I work at the prison, you see a lot of young men who are up there – and a lot of it has to do with broken relationships with fathers, broken relationships with persons they look up to and expect to get the right example of ‘this is how I am supposed to live; this is how I carry myself about’. Many of them didn’t have that example. So they found that on the street; or they found that on the television or in other places – and clearly those things give us some wrong ideals to follow.”

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