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Protecting our social values
The days of treating certain subjects as taboo must come to an end, because if we don't rationally and honestly face the issues this will only lead to chronic social illnesses.
- By Najla Al Awadhi, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:07 June 27, 2008
- The days of treating certain subjects as taboo must come to an end, because if we don't rationally and honestly face the issues this will only lead to chronic social illnesses.
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I'm 19, and I have Aids," as the boy uttered these words, there was a dead silence in the room full of college students. This was 10 years ago, during an awareness campaign about HIV that was organised by my friends and myself. Our goal was to educate students about the facts of HIV and Aids, and to discuss with them the irresponsible types of behaviour that are the leading causes of the proliferation of this virus.
This 19-year-old boy came from a home with lax and often absent parents. As a child, he was sexually abused by a man. He never told anyone about it. As a teenager he began to engage in self-destructive and homosexual behaviour which eventually led to him developing Aids. I remember distinctly, this boy telling me, "I wasn't born like this. Being sexually abused ruined my life". The abuse took his life off track, but the lack of familial or societal support aggravated his condition and led him to engage in negative and destructive behaviour.
This story came to mind because of the dimension of negative and destructive behaviour which was highlighted by the recent campaign carried out by Dubai Police, under the slogan of "Preserving Our Social Values". The campaign's primary focus was to crack down on behaviour deemed as threatening to our cultural values; in this particular case, the increasing phenomena of transvestite behaviour in the UAE.
Public indecency
According to the Dubai Police Chief Lt. General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, there is an "... emerging trend of men dressed as women and vice-versa in the UAE markets and streets", to such an extent that Dubai Police have stated that they will arrest transvestites if they are caught in public and will charge them with public indecency.
So maybe you're asking yourself, why this campaign, and why now? At the end of the day, a society is the sum of the behaviours of its citizens and residents. Since the UAE is primarily a young demographic, when we want to measure the social health of our society, one of the factors we view is the behaviour of our youth, and what Dubai Police had found in the public domain were alarming trends which were embodied in the emergence of behaviour that is sharply counter to our values.
I believe the causes for these negative trends are borne of several factors, namely; the lax attitude of parents today towards the issue of 'raising' their children. For example, the fast pace of life today and the numerous alternative activities have left youth at the mercy of television, internet and mobile phones. As long as these young people are busy with these things, parents feel that they have done their job by keeping their children engaged through technology, but this is no compensation for one-on-one quality time that a parent spends with his/her child teaching them about life, morals, values, and instilling in them a sense of civic duty and a noble sense of purpose.
We are increasingly leaving our youth un-monitored to learn what they will from TV, and the internet, which we know are both double-edged swords, as they can be portals to enlightening knowledge, but also portals to decadent content, particularly the internet which carries harmful content ranging from pornography to excessive violence.
Lax parenting also means parents are not closely monitoring who their children are spending time with, and bad friends can lead to an array of bad behaviour, beginning with smoking, drinking alcohol, sharing pornography, deviant sexual behaviour, to violent behaviour in the shape of gang activities.
In addition, lax parenting leads to a psychological divide between youth and their parents which means that when these youngsters face problems they will not approach their parents for help. There is also the factor of our over reliance on housemaids in child rearing and over all monitoring of our youth at home, which is a dangerous phenomena in the UAE. There are numerous cases of physical and even sexual abuse inflicted by maids onto youth, or inflicted by these youngsters onto maids, and which parents may never know about, but which will leave life-long scars on the victims.
Dubai Police's campaign highlights the fact that we need to take action to protect our youth, and our society from behaviours that are not part of our faith or our heritage. We can do this in several ways; if you have children or teenagers, "raise" them, take time to instill in them values, morals, and a noble sense of purpose, and create a solid bridge of communication with them. On a societal level we need to develop community centres, which provide healthy and dynamic alternatives for youth, and also provide counselling. This will be happening soon in Dubai as part of Dubai Government's strategy for social development.
Finally, the days of treating certain subjects as taboo must come to an end, because if we don't rationally and honestly face the issues this will only lead to chronic social illnesses.
We will always be an open and tolerant society, but when we witness negative and destructive behaviour encroaching on our social values, corrupting our youth, and our way of life, then we must be prepared to take a rational and firm stance against it.
Najla Al Awadhi is a member of the Federal National Council, Deputy CEO Dubai Media Incorporated and General Manager of Dubai One TV.
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