The Tribune

THE rising tide of serious crime in the Bahamas has reached the point at which a national debate is required to help solve the blight on society.

The reasons behind the increasing catalogue of murders, shootings, armed robberies and sexual assaults are many and varied, from gangs and drugs to youth unemployment and poverty. Is incarceration the answer? What can be done?

In 2015 an evidence-based discussion is required, one with emotion removed.

Dr Mike Neville is a forensic psychiatrist who has spent 40 years - the majority in the Bahamas - working in the hospitals, courts and prisons at close quarters with offenders. His experience and expertise qualifies him to examine the causes, effects and potential remedies of crime, from the cradle to the grave, and drawing on how other countries have tackled the issue.

And we want you to be involved and help inform the debate. Week-by-week during the coming months Dr Neville is analysing the reasons behind crime and challenging the perceptions of how it can be dealt with. Every Tuesday, through his articles in The Tribune and in a live phone-in today on the new Kiss FM96.1 at 3pm on 677-0961 he will welcome views - unconventional, challenging and supportive - from everyone. Join the discussions via comments on tribune242.com or email to lifeofcrime@tribunemedia.net.

The cure for crime lies with society as well as the government, police and other agencies. It is time for new year resolve and resolution.

The headline above is hopefully abhorrent to most of you, but historically it is a concept that had found some favour, especially in Europe. Cesare Lombroso was a physician who believed that criminal behaviour was inherited and that criminals were easily recognised by their looks, which he believed were shifty-looking fellows with sloping foreheads!

It is scientific nonsense but I am sure plenty of people still think they know what a criminal looks like. A more sinister development started around the same time when, in 1869, Sir Francis Galton came up with the theory of Eugenics which basically sold the idea that mankind could be improved through selective reproduction.

It became popular amongst academics even though it did not fit with Gregor Mendel’s theory of inheritance and it was many years before the two theories were combined to make some sort of sense. In Germany, the Eugenics movement took a particularly ominous turn with much of the medical and psychiatric communities believing in the concept.

It began in Germany and other European countries with forced sterilisation of “undesirable children” and slowly moved into the killing of mentally ill and physically disabled children. It moved on to children of mixed race, gypsies and children of the Jewish faith.

It is believed that about 5,000 children died this way. It is also believed that as many as 350,000 people were sterilised. This concept - known as “social Darwinism” - is also referred to as survival of the fittest by elimination of the unfit. The genetic information could not have justified these beliefs but by the end of the Second World War it was estimated that only 15 per cent of mental hospital patients had survived and the Holocaust remains a stark reminder of man’s potential for inhumanity.

I have written about these historical disasters to remind us how careful we must be with scientific information to make sure we never repeat them. Eugenics was a medical concept with followers across the globe before it became a tool of the Nazi party.

This leads us into the research into the effects of legalised abortion on crime. It is known as the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis and it argues that children who are unwanted or who are unloved and not properly cared for are more likely to commit crimes. The authors of the study in Chicago showed that, 18 years after the legalisation of abortion in 1973, there was a reduction in crime starting in 1992 and dropping more sharply by 1995 - the rough age demographic for criminal behaviour to be at its peak.

These results have been criticised by a number of authors, largely I believe because of the emotive issue of abortion. I do think, however, that everyone would agree that unwanted, unloved and abused children are much more likely to commit crimes during their lives.

The question is - how do we change this dynamic without social engineering? Or more simply put - how do we ensure that children are loved, nurtured and protected from abuse?

How can this be achieved in The Bahamas, remembering that abortion is illegal here, except under some very strict exceptions. Is there room to help parents and further prevent abuse?

The next issue that has been extensively studied is what happens to a foetus while still in the mother’s womb. There have been enormous strides of late in convincing mothers not to drink or smoke and be careful with prescribed medication and their diet. This has not always been the case and there are still many mothers driven by poverty, despair and addictions who still take things that may damage the unborn baby. The potential for damage is often at its worst in the first trimester, when women may not even be sure that they are pregnant.

Alcohol can lead to foetal damage and, in excess, to “foetal alcohol spectrum disorder”. There is plenty of international research on the implications of this condition: it shows that you are 19 times more likely to go to prison than the general population if you suffer from this disorder and it impacts intelligence and causes difficulties in impulse control, difficulties in planning, vulnerability to peer pressure and inability to figure out consequences. In fact, the very constellation of problems found in criminal populations.

We know that cigarette smoking in pregnancy leads to low birth weight and a number of other problems that are thought to occur. This leads into the research on cocaine use in pregnancy, which shows increased difficulties with behaviour, language development, impaired auditory information processing and attention difficulties.

The problem has been that cocaine use is often clustered with other risk factors such as poverty and child abuse. The research tries to isolate risk factors but in the real world it is usually the case that there is a combination of a multitude of factors.

There are so many other things that may or may not add to the complexity of insults to the foetus. Lead is known to be a major problem that I will examine next week in its effect on babies and toddlers but surely the mother’s exposure to lead can also be passed to the foetus with even more devastation to the developing brain.

What about medication that your doctor gives you? Sometimes absolutely essential to the mother’s health, wellbeing and even life, but what are the dangers?

The drug thalidomide was prescribed for anxiety, insomnia, gastritis and tension; it stopped nausea in pregnancy and was used for morning sickness. It also led to limb deformities and caused many infant deaths.

These were dramatic effects but many other drugs have a more subtle effect on brain development leading to some of the difficulties associated with law breaking. This area is still a developing area of research and whilst not directly related to crime there is a great deal of work looking into foetal development and the alarming increase in autism spectrum disorder.

Recent studies, which tested amniotic fluid that had been stored years ago, have shown a correlation between increased levels of testosterone and other steroids in those samples and the later diagnosis of autism.

The more we understand what can potentially damage a foetus, the better we will understand child development.

This is a change of direction before we even reach the usual debate on crime and punishment but there seems to be a strong argument for improving our obstetric care. We need to understand that programmes like “The Pace Programme“ for pregnant girls is not just a nice thing to do but a potential crime-fighting tool. We must work even harder on the education messages that focus on making the right choices on birth control and healthy pregnancy.

It is time to make sure that we support the community health nursing outreach programmes and ensure that they are properly funded. It would also help if we can look at ways to bolster the help we can give to at-risk mothers.

NEXT WEEK: real problems arising in the first five years of life if abuse and neglect outweight love and nurture.

Illustration by Jamaal Rolle