(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) The situation with crime and violence in the Region “requires resolute and sustained action” to combat it.
In making that point, His Excellency Ambassador Colin Granderson, Assistant Secretary-General Foreign and Community Relations at the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat cited governments, the judiciary, law enforcement agencies, the private sector, Faith Based Organisations, the media and other civil society groups, communities, families and individuals as participants in such action.
Speaking at the media launch in Guyana on Wednesday of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Caribbean Human Development Report 2012, Ambassador Granderson said what was needed was “a ‘whole of society’ approach to address these challenges which threaten our very existence.”
The Report sub-titled Human Development and the Shift to Better Citizen Security, was presented to the media at the Grand Coastal Hotel by Mr Heraldo Muñoz, UN Assistant Secretary-General/UNDP Assistant Administrator and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. In his presentation Mr Muñoz stated that while the world homicide rate was 6.9 per 100,000, the rate in the Caribbean was 20 per 100,000. He also pointed out that with 9 per cent of the world’s population, the Latin American and Caribbean Region accounted for 27 per cent of homicides worldwide.
In welcoming the report, Ambassador Granderson said it served to focus attention on the extent of the challenge facing the Region but also made a strong case for re-orienting perspectives with regard to dealing with crime and violence.
“It makes compelling arguments for the co-ordinated involvement of a range of partners in addressing the solutions to this scourge which we are witnessing everyday primarily through the media and for too many of us, through our own personal experiences and those of our friends and loved ones,” he stated.
The Assistant Secretary-General noted that it was instructive that the 2010 Report of the CARICOM Commission on Youth Development had highlighted personal insecurity as the leading concern of youth across the Region. In that regard, he was pleased to “note that this Caribbean Human Development Report has a strong focus on youth, building resilience and protective factors, social inclusion, second chance (restoration and re-integration) and on education and training.”
Mr Granderson welcomed the UNDP report’s emphasis on shifting the approach towards such measures as community policing, social crime prevention and creating a groundswell of support to change communities. He told his audience that the Caribbean Community had recently embarked, through the Secretariat and its local and external partners, on the implementation of a CARICOM Social Development and Crime Prevention Strategy. The approaches advocated in the Strategy, he said, were congruent with the Citizen Security concept.
He expressed the hope that the media launch would not merely provide a source of reporting for the days or the week ahead, but that it would convince the media of the influential role which they could play in the development of the Region by their active engagement.
