Parents urged to monitor children online activities
As stakeholders in the education sector grapple with increasing violence in schools, one expert has pointed to underage gambling being a major contributor to the issue. This has resulted in stealing and other behavioural issues among youths.
Educational social worker at the Ministry of Education and Youth, Camille Blake, said there has definitely been an increase in the number of youths engaging in gambling since the COVID-19 pandemic, but while non-traditional high schools are welcoming of interventions to address the problem, the more traditional schools are generally not willing to bring attention to the issue.
While most gamblers are boys, girls are increasingly getting involved in the activity.
“So many times when you’re seeing the fights and stabbings that are taking place, it’s over the fact that the child may have his last $100; they gamble, lose it in the gambling, and then their response [is], ‘I don’t have the $100 to reach home, and I want to get back my money’,” Blake explained in the “Risky Business” podcast hosted by the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries Commission.
“No one is going to willingly give back the money that way, so they end up in having fights. And when you realise that you’re going to be losing out in this battle, you tend to do harmful things like stabbing, or you have gang wars taking place within the schools,” she said.
In the case of girls, gambling has led to transactional sex, as it’s a way to settle debts.
“So there’s an exchange of sex…Because that is also seen as an exchange…’I don’t have the money, but my body can use as a benefit for me [to be] able to get what I need in the moment.’ So we have seen various behavioural issues that are stemming from gambling. We heard that it’s supposed to be fun, but right now we’re having more problems,” she stated.
The educational social worker said guidance counsellors are overwhelmed and parents are often called in as part of the intervention process. Students with severe gambling issues are sent to the RISE LIFE Management Services (formerly Addiction Alert). They generally have different sessions to gain a better understanding of the issues, the reasons behind their gambling habits and measures are implemented to provide them with the necessary support.
Associate Psychologist and Programme Manager at RISE LIFE, Richard Henry, noted that gambling has become normalised in the Jamaican society. In many communities, a gambling table is out nightly.
A study completed in Jamaica on gambling among adolescents in 2007 found that young people did not believe they were gambling when they were using anything outside of money. But he noted that other things that are of value are being used.
It doesn’t help that children are bombarded with advertisements promoting different games, even while on the buses going to schools.
“They now have to negotiate that. And unfortunately, some of them start to think about, ‘how can I get involved in this activity?’ So, our programmes in school through the Ministry of Education and Youth, they have to be ramped up, because young people now, more than ever, need the right information to make the right decisions about being involved with underage gambling,” Henry stated.
The 2007 data indicated that one in five young persons would have been exposed to and has the possibility of developing a gambling related problem. This works out to about 20 percent of the adolescent population. Another study is currently being done to get more up to date statistics.
Blake noted that online gaming has become a gateway to hardcore gambling. She said many children got involved during the Covid-19 pandemic when schools went online.
“I’ve been going to number of the sessions with the officers from Rise Life [and] I realized that for instance Free Fire, that was a game that many of the students tend to play often, I realized that they said that for you to move to another level you would have to use your credit card and most times the children know how [to be] sneaky to get the credit card from their parents wallets because parents have to be working long hours, and when they’re sleeping they just know how to get the cards to move to the next level, so this has been stemming from Covid online,” she explained.
Henry said that the online space is very difficult to police because there are different laws. In some jurisdictions, there are no laws that address people being involved with gambling activities online. Children are also involved in betting online. To safeguard children, Henry is urging parents to do their own policing.
“Parents have to get more investigative; parents have to be more informed to be able to manage that space because the online space has many different players,” he said.
Meanwhile, Blake warns parents to discourage the behaviour from as early as possible. Her warning comes based on the realisation that some parents are also benefiting from the gambling habits of their children.
“We are trying to tell parents that we can’t allow our children to be the breadwinner of the family, and if they are becoming the breadwinner of the family they start taking up basically big people behavior; and when they do this, now there’s a more chronic issue in our school system [and] more problems for our guidance counselors.”
