The benefits of sport for personal health and wellbeing is widely known and accepted.  Sports as a deterrent to crime?  That’s another ball game, entirely.  Mention reducing youth crime and invariable youth involvement in more sports is the preferred, ready-made solution.  We talk about it so casually to the point of passionately believing that it is automatic.  More sport mean less crime?  Not so, say the experts.  It’s a myth.
Research from the University of Illinois confirms that organized activity is important to youth.  Significantly more important is that youth “participate because they truly enjoy the activity and take on a leadership role.”  In other words while they want adult involvement, they want even more of adults who “inspire” and adults who “are confident in handing teens the reins.”
This article noted, too, there was a “tipping point”.  This is when too much involvement in extra curricular activity “actually increases levels of risky behaviours and serious delinquency.”  They say, more time spent away from watchful eyes of adults apparently, intensifies “the negative effect peer influences that students are exposed to.”
The best advice from researchers is that before we even begin to think of applying a bandage (sport) on the wound (crime), there first needs to be an analysis of the causes of youth crime.  It means that we must open dialogue with our youth and this is something we fear doing.
Research from Duke University has identified a “cascading effect” of repeated negative incidents and behaviours as the foundation to deviant behaviour and which “could be traced back to children born with biological risks or into economically disadvantaged environments, both of which make consistent parenting a challenge.”
What the research further reveals is that there is more to just asking youth to suit up for basketball or soccer or netball as has been the case recently with a flurry of sporting events linked to crime reduction locally.
The Grass Street basketball court is perfect example of this wishful thinking: “if you build it, they will come” out to play and crime would be the farthest thing on their minds.
According to the experts, however, this is an unrealistically high expectation of using sport to make a difference.  What it does expose though are the realities and challenges in politically neglected and economically deprived communities (as we say, ghettos).
The Grass Street court was opened with much pomp and ceremony.  But there has not been a game to match the flair and flamboyance of area representative, Honourable Richard Frederick, on opening day.  The only persons who have used the court consistently were toddlers from a neighbourhood preschool, which has since relocated.  Now the white elephant court is used for anything but sports. The St Lucia Basketball Federation (SLBF) would have surely put the funds to more practical and productive use, for example, to launch its Kiddies Basketball tournament.
Remember some years ago, a court was also built in the CDC housing development with the same premise.  Do we hear of any organized sports there?  No!
And once again, the same brainpower behind the Grass Street court is being put into the revitalization of the court in the Gardens (George V Park).  The only benefit for these communities is that it provides short-term employment for a chosen few.
What is being attempted harkens back to a time when the Gardens was used as a melting pot for the surrounding communities of Conway/Barnard Hill, Georgeville, New Village, La Pansee, Morne du Don, CDC, etc.  The Gardens courts, then, were the great equalizer.  We can even reach back further, when St Lucia’s first social worker/lifesaver, James Belgrave used boxing and steelband (sports and the arts) and the 3Rs to transform delinquents (then called “wharf rats”), into productive and respectable humans.
Yes, of course, there is merit in believing that sport (and arts), considered positive activity, will keep youth from the delinquent behaviours, considered negative activity, that lead to crime. The simplicity of all this is that if you fill a youth’s life with the positive, there will be little time to seek out and be involved with the negative. But that was about three to five decades ago.  Much has changed: the people and the environment in these neighbourhoods, attitudes and expectations.
As psychologist Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy would attest, there are just too much worrying about too many hungry mouths to feed and too many bodies to clothe by too many parents with little prospect of gainful employment because they lack the skills for today’s job market.  Unless Frederick can help satisfy these basic needs properly, he faces an unending crusade of motivating youth in these areas to come out to play, and that apparently is beyond any politician’s game of convenience and expediency.
The research says that sport by itself will do nothing but create good feelings, in the short term, but little else, in the long term.  For sport to have a dent on crime, sport must be done in conjunction or in tandem with other social support programmes to makes a difference.  So, by all means build courts, but bring satellite branches of NSDC, for example.  Our police force, too, needs to establish a social presence there as well.
So we come back to the perspicacious and potent thinking of our own Sir Arthur Lewis who,  decades ago, recognized that education—not money—holds the key.  Education lessens the possibility of people being exploited; exploitation is always at the roots of conflict and violence.
The studies also say that sport as solutions to crime come in three broad categories: Sport as distraction—meaning that if youth are in sport, they cannot be in crime at the same time.  Sport as behaviour therapy—the effects are based on teaching values such as team work, respect for others, etc, and Sport as a “hook”—sport as motivation to other positive pursuits.  They have identified three types of programmes: primary (environmental) and secondary (targeting ‘at-risk’ youth) prevention and tertiary (rehabilitation) programmes.
There are untold dangers, the studies point out, in not knowing when to apply the right one appropriately.  Researchers in this field warn against applying broad brush stroke or a ‘one-fits-all’ type solution to situations that are multifarious and which require layers of interventions at different levels.
I apologise because the research is mostly from the United States and that has it own limitations as to relevance to our local situation.  We have absolutely no research on sport in St Lucia, and similarly with sketchy research on crime, the temptation is usually to impose anecdotal evidence as empirical.  If perhaps the US research doesn’t apply here, it can allow us to rethink our notions. One bit of research that surprised me was from Northeastern University:  the belief that sport prevented delinquency in boys.  “The same activities affect young men and women differently,” they confirmed.  Sports worked, however, for young women “whose risk for delinquent behaviour was reduced significantly if they took part in sports.  Other activities, such as church and after-school community activities decreased the risk of delinquency for boy, but not so for girls.”  But while these protected youth from delinquent behaviours “which includes fighting, carrying a weapon and violence, it did not protect them from risky behaviours such as drinking, smoking and drunk driving.”
Researchers found “no significant association between sporting activity and aggressive behaviour or team sport participation and delinquency and aggressive behaviour.” This has lead them to “reject the more simple versions of the hypothesis that sport has a deterrent impact on delinquent behaviour.”
As the “Ruff Guide to Sports and Youth Crime” at www.sportsdevelopment.info, website states: “Exclusion from sport is not the cause and by inference, inclusion in it cannot be the solution.”