Director of the Criminal Justice Research and Planning Unit, Cheryl Willoughby, believes that discipline cannot fall under a ‘one type fits all’ approach.
She pointed out that any form of chosen discipline should take into account the type of child and the situation, noting “you may flog one child and it may work, but it doesn’t work for another child”.
“I will not get on the band wagon and say we should flog or we should not flog. What I am saying is that we should discipline our children in such a way that they understand that certain behaviours are not going to be appreciated or are not right,” she said.
Speaking to the media after the press launch of the Winners’ Circle: Making the Right Choice’ programme at the office of the Ministry of Home Affairs, she cautioned against the wholesale adoption of positions taken in other jurisdictions in discarding the option of flogging, pointing to research which had shown that this had not had the intended outcome.
“What I am also concerned about is that we continuously stress that we should seek alternatives to flogging, but I am yet to hear what those alternatives are. I have seen from my own research as a criminologist, that some of the jurisdictions that have banned or prohibited flogging, crime among young people, have escalated on an annual basis. So we cannot take our model from jurisdictions that have failed as a country; we have to develop our own value system,” she stressed. (JMB)