Dr Monique Keyser has not told Bermuda anything it does not know, even if it does not want to admit it, about the small army of “wall sitters” and gang members who are steadily destroying themselves and the social fabric of the Island.But it is immensely helpful to see the information in one place. Dr Keyser, a lead researcher for the Mincy Report, returned to the Island to update the community in the interviews she conducted with troubled young people. While the Mincy Report largely focused on broad statistics, Dr Keyser’s latest report concentrated on the individual interviews she conducted. While the sample was small, her specific findings are as compelling as the broad outlines found in the Mincy Report. She said 72 percent had been involved in using or selling drugs and 64 percent had been involved in crime, which had resulted in probation or prison.The majority were from single parent homes that grew up with little or no contact with their fathers. Seventy-four percent of those interviewed identified a “family stressor” such as death, divorce or incarceration. Most had been expelled from school, usually for fighting or drugs, 73 percent did not complete their GED and only 18 percent attended college, although none of them had got college degrees. Dr Keyser said: “Schools are doing nothing for them, they are putting them in a dead-end place. There are school dropouts at age 16 and there’s nowhere for them to go, there’s no alternative system to pick them up.”One of the primary findings in the Mincy Report was that education was one of the major predictors for whether young males would be on a path to a successful life, or if they would end up on the streets. But Dr Keyser’s report found that traditional Bermuda schools were “doing nothing for them”. This conundrum has resulted in calls for more school counsellors, and while that may help, it seems unlikely that it will be enough.That’s because dropping out of school is only one in a series of all-too-predictable steps. It starts in the home, usually headed by a single mother. From there, the spiral almost always leads to trouble in school caused by fighting or drugs, followed by expulsion or dropping out. By that time, the mother has usually had enough too, and the young man is now on the streets, with no home, no education and little prospect of meaningful employment. And somehow, Bermuda is surprised when this same young man turns to drugs and crime, and sees no future past the end of the barrel of a gun.Bermuda has generally shied away from criticising the young people who create children, then fail to stay together with the result that the child begins life in a single parent home with little prospect of being raised successfully. Yes, there are people who have been successful after being raised in a single parent home. But they are the exception.To deal with crime, Bermuda has to start with the need for women to wait until they can give their children a stable upbringing, preferably in a two parent home. And while it may seem unfair to say that it is the women who need to wait, men must take responsibility too, but it is the women who will bear the children and most likely will be responsible for their upbringing. So it is ultimately the woman’s responsibility to say no and to take precautions.There’s much more that can and should be done, but it has to start at the beginning at conception.