Violent crime is spreading and worsening like a disease in our community. The spawn of fear, anger and desperation has reared its ugly head, and its roots are firmly planted in Bermuda's darkest secret. How can we put an end to this violence and make Bermuda a safe place in which to live again?

In order to deal with this dangerous and disturbing trend, we must first identify the social, economic and historical factors that have converged to bring us to this place.

While this country is among the world's wealthiest in per capita terms, the distribution of wealth draws a stark divide between the wealthy and poor.

Bermuda's darkest secret is that far too many children are growing up in poverty. As of 2000, 50 percent of black female-headed households lived at or below the poverty line. That was nine years ago and the situation is considerably worse today. Many Bermudians – even those working multiple jobs – simply cannot earn enough money to adequately provide for their families. The sad truth is that they cannot earn a living wage given the extraordinarily high cost of living. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that children often are not supported by two-parent families. The result is that these children are growing up undernourished and essentially homeless, as they often do not know where their next meal will come from or where they will be sleeping in the near future. When they do have a roof over their heads, they share one bedroom with their mother, siblings, and possibly others. They have no privacy or quiet place to do homework. Moreover, they go to school the next morning without having eaten breakfast, and often carrying no lunch. These children are constantly subject to the stresses of their older family members, which often include threats of imprisonment from bill collectors.

Few people realise just how expensive it is to be poor. Let us take Malika for example. She was married and has three children; her husband from whom she is separated has not paid child support for five years and owes more than $20,000.

She works for a well-known grocery store and makes $15 an hour. After a 38-hour week, her take home pay is $420 after deductions. She and another mother with two children share a one-bedroom apartment. She and her children sleep in the bedroom and the other family sleeps in the living room.

With three children in primary school, Malika generates lots of laundry each week. As she has neither a bike or a car she must take her laundry to the laundromat by taxi, where the washer and drier can cost her $50 or $60. Because she has limited funds and cannot afford to buy laundry soap in bulk, she spends three or four times as much buying small packets for each load.

She then returns home by taxi with her three large bags of clean laundry. By the time she finishes she will have spent three hours and as much as $70 while most of the rest of us spend less time and perhaps pennies for electricity to do our laundry.

Malika returns home to find the bailiff there to arrest her for a judgment received against her for an unpaid bill three years ago (which she has not had the funds to pay) and she is off to debtors prison like so many of the women that she knows, leaving her children behind wondering what their mother has done to deserve this. You can imagine how much respect this engenders for the criminal justice system in the eyes of this family. By tomorrow or later tonight, she will be released as we will receive a call, collect money from our supporters, and pay the bill for her, but the experience is very traumatic for the whole family.

Back home Malika struggles to find enough food to make lunches for her children. Dinner will have to wait because her electricity has been turned off because her payment is months behind and she will have to buy something that is already cooked which will likely cost her twice as much and be half as nutritious.

She has been to financial assistance but was turned away because she has a full time job and her child support is counted as income even though she has not seen any in five years.

Malika's eldest son Aaron is eight-years-old and is having trouble at school where he has been suspended twice. This difficulty in class may very well have to do with the fact that he has no personal space to do his homework and by 5.30 at this time of year, he will be working in the dark. He saw his dad about a month ago but his parents got into such a fight over child support that he is afraid what might happen if he shows up again.

He seems angry and distant a lot of the time, and his mother has been called into the school a number of times over concerns about his fighting in the schoolyard. When she has to go to the school, she loses time from work further diminishing her pay that week.

Erin has two younger sisters, both of whom are very overweight, largely because of the high fat-high carbohydrate diet that the family eats, as these are the least expensive foods. Food cannot be bought in bulk to save money as that involves a one off but large expense. Fresh food cannot be stored or frozen food purchased because of the expense and lack of refrigeration. The irony is that though obese, these young girls are actually malnourished and have developed food preferences that will ensure that they will have an increasingly difficult time maintaining a healthy weight as they get older.

These children are growing up in a community where drug abuse and violence runs rampant, and gang culture is pervasive. They are exposed to these elements at an early age and grow up with gang life and criminal activity as a backdrop. Neglected by their parents trying to make ends meet and working long hours and given up on by schools, troubled youth seek acceptance, safety, security, and self worth from gang families. In the same vein, they turn to the drug trade in order to earn the money and lifestyle that they do not think can be attained legitimately.

There are clear economic reasons why these young people adopt a life of crime. The first is that unskilled wages in Bermuda are too low and are insufficient to cover even basic living expenses in Bermuda. Young people can earn a great deal of money quickly in the drug trade.

The second is that the difference between their prospective earnings differential between crime and legitimate unskilled work is more than enough to compensate for the relatively low potential costs to criminal activity. Rightly or wrongly, these young people perceive their probability of being caught, tried and convicted as being low. This hearkens back to the sheer inequity of wealth distribution in Bermuda: surrounded by so much wealth, it is especially difficult for young people to make a conscious decision to be among the working poor, rather than a moneyed outlaw.

There are also social explanations for this phenomenon. As the recent study on young black Bermudian males quite rightly points out, many young men perceive the benefits of pursuing further education as falling short of the costs. Moreover, they often grow up without strong, legitimately successful role models. Instead, they have only the drug-dealers and gang leaders – to look up to as role models. Essentially, the economic hardships of being among the working poor in Bermuda have constructed a legacy of drugs and crime, sustainably exerting social, economic, and psychological pressures on Bermuda's poorest children to pursue a life of crime. Some of these points are well known. What is not as widely recognised is the recent trend of their female counterparts toward gang-related activities.

Recent emphasis on "rescuing" young black males perhaps a somewhat misguided "Squeaky Wheel Syndrome" – this emphasis on males ignores the very real problems festering in the community of young women who are becoming increasingly aggressive, promiscuous and choosing to associate with "thugs".

Increasingly, these young women are being affected by the social and economic predisposing factors that drive violent crime within the male community.

While it is true that in the past the females in the black community outperformed the males (once they had been in the workplace for a while) and indeed have reached higher levels of education, the data that supports this trend is based on conditions ten to 20 years ago. It cannot be assumed that this trend will continue.

Evidence from recent problems at the middle school level but increasingly at the senior school level suggests that young girls are forming gangs that mirror those of their male counterparts and are using violence and aggression in much the same way.

So if these are some of the features of our community that have created this perfect storm, how do we go about addressing the problem?

The situation needs to be addressed on four fronts – Prevention, Deterrence, Intervention and Treatment. My ten-point plan is as follows:

1. In recognition of the direct link between the growing income inequity and violent and predatory crime, steps must be taken to address the extreme poverty in the bottom quartile of the income scale. This means taking a serious look at what would be a sustainable wage for people in unskilled or semi-skilled sectors of the community. This may even involve considering wage guidelines for employers in this sector. The issue of unskilled and semi-skilled foreign labour and the effect it has on jobs and wages available to Bermudians must also be addressed.

2. Public policy and legislative recognition that adequate, affordable housing is a basic human right.

3. Revamp the entire Department of Financial Assistance with a focus on sensitivity and interdepartmental communication and cooperation.

4. Establish two single sexed (weekly) boarding schools for at risk or troubled youth with a focus on the talents and gifts of these young people. The purpose for this is not punishment but to provide a stable, nurturing, safe and drug free environment.

5. Consider decriminalising marijuana taking the extreme profit out of the sale and distribution and putting it in the hands of a regulatory agency that allocates the profits to treatment, education, and prevention.

6. Reexamine current polices regarding bail and shorten the time between the charge and the trial.

7.Extend witness protection to include the use of the United Kingdom as a safe haven for those who testify or help the police.

8. Introduce new legislation directed toward violent offenders to include mandatory minimum sentences and extended life long parole supervision upon release.

9. Put greater focus on the training and oversight of the police force.

10. Criminal behaviour, gang related relationships, and illicit drug use all begin at the middle school level and it is at that level that strong and consistent prevention and intervention must begin. This will require the doubling of counseling resources and much more intense conflict resolution training in middle schools.

We have reached the point where we must address this country's economic shortcomings, the effect that they have on children, and the role that they play in criminal activity. At the same time, we must remember that we have been the authors of our own misfortune.

We need people to join the cause; to speak out against these terrible phenomena and take action to provide hope for Bermuda's young and disadvantaged.

Make the fight against poverty and violence in this country your cause.

It is up to each of us to stand up and say: "I will not stand idly by while children grow up in my country without a home, without proper nutrition, without a good education, without a fair shake!"

For if we each make this cause our own, our community will unite – our hope will persevere, our affliction will not survive and we can build a safer, happier, more prosperous society for our children and ourselves.

Sheelagh Cooper is a professional criminologist and founder and chairwoman of the Coalition for the Protection of Children. She can be contacted at sheelaghcooperhotmail.com