BY ROBERT BEST

A FEW DAYS AGO Magistrate Barbara Cooke-Alleyne expressed concern over the number of children who have been coming before her Juvenile Court because of gambling.

She was participating in a programme aimed at primary schoolchildren about to make the move to secondary schools to help them cope with the pressures they were likely to face in a teenage world.

She said: "I find that children spend their lunch hour engaged in playing dice, cock-fighting (and) dog-fighting and then they end up coming before me. . . . Once they start gambling, it gets into their system and they get addicted; then they start to steal to get money to play dice and when they are not winning they get angry and they are fighting.

"So I might see them on more than one charge – charges of gambling, stealing, violence such as fighting and so on. It disturbs me to see so many young people coming before me destroying their lives at an early age and I am trying to find out how I can save them and help them save themselves.

"I recognised that it was important [that] we start from an early age to educate young people about illegal drugs, illicit sex, theft and other crimes that they might encounter while they are at both primary and secondary schools."

Barbadians of an earlier generation might have had concerns similar to those of the magistrate except that in one or two areas the situation certainly has been aggravated by changes in our lifestyles.

For generations, most children growing up in Barbadian villages would have been aware of the village gamblers who were to be found "nicking" almost all through the week, and would be "raided" by the police who would drive through the villages for that specific purpose.

Many, too, were the tales told of how village gamblers were forced to take off and leave the money in the "pot" in order to escape being arrested.

Children growing up in such an environment were no strangers to these village activities but the difference between then and now is that at that time the children, if they had any thoughts about gambling, would have had to do so with buttons. Money was scarce, unlike today where many children find themselves handling lunch money daily that would have been the pay for a week for adult workers back then.

Money not spent on today's lunch can be used for tomorrow's dice game by those who do not play for buttons, and younger students might even be forced to hand over their lunch money so the older ones could use it to gamble.

Then again, there is the total environment.

We are a society heavily immersed in games of chance, whether it is playing the one-armed bandits, Lotto, scratch games or the racing pools – there are a lot of opportunities for gambling nowadays, organised or otherwise – unheard of in earlier times. Even female senior citizens can be seen "taking a chance" using their pension money, with many having Lotto as their game of preference.

It is going to be most difficult for our children, whatever the law says about not allowing them to participate in certain games of chance until age 18, not to live what they learn from the goings on around them daily.

For all that, ours is a society that rails against the evils of casino gambling but sees no comparable dangers in the heavy gambling we know goes on at all levels of our society, where participants all have the same intent.

By the time our children reach 18 they have a multiplicity of gambling methods to choose from and not all will wait until the gambling age of consent to do so. Some would have seen and know how to "nick" the dice a lot earlier.

The biggest danger is that where a number of them become "seasoned" gamblers, they will develop a mindset which leads them to believe that they can make a living by just gambling, and even when they work they can end up losing their money gambling in the hope of "hitting it big". They never accept that the odds are against them.

That is why we have a growing number of gambling addicts in Barbados who never realise that they are addicted and so never seek help with their problem. They just go on doing what they have been doing, more often than not, losing not only their money, but also opportunities to improve themselves and their living standards.

They can become desperate and start stealing from family and friends, and are often found using funds entrusted to them by others to support their gambling habit, as the situation gets out of control. This is what gambling does to many who become ensnared not only as adults but even earlier as children.

It is usually very difficult to help adults who become addicted and it is a much greater challenge when the problem stretches way back from childhood.

* Robert Best is a former managing editor of the Barbados Advocate.