The Tribune

By KIRKLAND PRATT

In recent years, the term family values has become a rallying cry against the increase in fragmented and nontraditional families within the Bahamas. As I see it, the definition of marriage is challenged so fiercely by disenfranchised and marginalized groups within the population (not only in the Bahamas but globally) due in part to the intensity of divorce rates and cheating spouses.

Moreover, the prevailing sweethearting culture throughout our islands is normalized as so many within society are desensitized to the immediate and over-reaching adverse impact it has. The support systems that make sweethearting strong all contribute to the devaluation of the family unit: the persons who facilitate the meetings and contribute to the ease of all that is clandestine about extramarital affairs.

In 2007 Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, on the heels of a very successful social incentive to build substantial families and reduce crime, defended his intense scrutiny of the submitted proposals to introduce a “healthy marriage” programme that would teach people how to stay together as a family.

Cameron, whose efforts to get tough on the causes of crime included tackling family breakdown to prevent youth crime, declared: “We need policies which implicitly assume the worth of long-term domestic stability and which, therefore, support and encourage healthy marriage as the relationship most likely to deliver that social good.”

Cameron continued: “We believe that unless we try now to understand how important stable families are to reducing crime and particularly youth crime, we risk making young people the target.” Singling out the spate of gangland murders in south London, he added: “Gangs are crowded with boys who have never been part of an intact family, where people belonged with and to each other.”

Back on our side of the pond, we are able to see pound for pound the correlation between devaluing family values, our collective support for the same and the menacing criminal ills that plague our Bahamas.

The breakdown of the family and its links to criminality is not a phenomenon that exists within a vacuum – it is a true-to-life symptom of crime. Any major governmental attempt to thwart the criminal element among us must find its heels dug deeply into the thousands of homes which serve as the first agents of socialization for moms and dads as well as the impressionable children who model what they are taught through observation and influence.

Conceivably, the collateral damage linked with cheating has no greater or more devastating impact than on the consciousness of a young and impressionable child, who is not yet prepared to process a most troubling reality and happenstance of the adult world. Parents, who have betrayed, have not only done so with their significant other but also in the confidence of their children who placed them as a source of respect and admiration in their young and fragile lives. In the instances where the cheating has been made public, the child may face ridicule by his/her unforgiving peers. If the cheating causes a separation for the parents, the absence results in decreased bonding – boys suffer especially when the father is absent. This often leads into resentment and ultimately rebellious behaviour from the impacted child. Certainly the spouse suffers social shame and becomes the subject of curious observance.

Broadly, the issue of cheating spouses encompasses more than a broken heart – it has societal repercussions that need to be examined closely so as to curve the degradation of what we know to be family values.

Keep thinking though, you are good for it.

• Kirkland H. Pratt, MSCP, is a Counselling Psychologist with a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology with an emphasis in Education. He lectures in Industrial Psychology and offers counselling and related services to individuals and businesses. For comments, contact kirklandpratt@gmail.com.