Bermuda should stop wringing its hands about the escalating gang threat and sink some serious money into education.

That is the view of former Home Affairs Minister Quinton Edness who said the Island's literacy deficit was one of the root causes behind the rising violence.

And if ignored, he said Bermuda would go the way of the Bahamas where murder and rape are rampant.

The Bahamas now has a murder rate of 22 per 100,000 people described by a politician there as being more than four times the internationally accepted average of five murders per 100,000 population.

Worryingly, Bermuda suffered five murders last year and, with a population far below 100,000, its murder rate is now getting on for more than twice the international average.

Mr. Edness said he had just come from a trip to the Bahamas where he was disturbed at the parallels.

"Today that country is like Murder Incorporated.

"I recall it started exactly the same way as it started in Bermuda with these occasional drive-by shootings.

"That country has been declared the worst country for rape and abuse in the world."

So unless Bermuda upped its game it was heading down the same sorry road, said Mr. Edness, who recognises reversing the trend is a long-term project.

He told The Royal Gazette: "It is going to take ten years.

"It's an extremely deep problem and obviously goes back to some bad policy decisions, things not done over the years."

The former United Bermuda Party politician agreed with comments made by family campaigner Sheelagh Cooper, who argued that rising poverty and broken families contributed to the problem.

And poverty will continue to soar because of mass lay-offs likely in construction as current large projects wind-up, believes Mr. Edness.

"There will be nothing coming up behind so a lot of people will be out of work. It will be in the hundreds."

He attributes one of the key factors behind the poverty, which bred gangs, as Bermuda's failure to improve literacy.

"Remedial literacy recovery is not funded properly. It doesn't take a child very long to realise they are a failure compared to other children so they drop out.

"By the time they reach their teens the only way they can have any identity, any dignity, is to belong to a gang involved in drugs.

"That's what they admire, that's what they are doing."

Pre-school literacy, which starts after a child is born, is needed to give kids a flying start which would carry on into primary school.

"Then we should be heavy in literacy and numeracy throughout."

The recent highly-publicised problems of 24 middle school kids held back after they failed their high school transfer exams three times is seen as another symptom of the literacy lag.

The decision to deny them promotion until they had achieved 50 percent in maths and literacy has been attacked by paediatrician Bente Lundh, who said it was important to find out the reason they failed.

Mr. Edness claimed: "The reason they failed is they are not literate.

"That exam is an eighth grade exam, they read possibly at the fourth grade level. That is what is happening in this country and nobody is actually facing it.

"Until Government and parents decide to zero in on teaching children to read from an early stage we will have this problem."

Mr. Edness said the human brain develops at the fastest rate between birth and the age of five, making young children able to consume more in that period than at any other stage in life.

"That is when they should be taught literacy early but they are not getting it."

While the Bahamas served as a warning, other countries are showing the way, believes Mr. Edness.

Australia has spent more than $500 million upgrading its pre-school literacy, starting in the home with a massive public relations programme encouraging literacy training from the time children are born.

"They are building pre-school nurseries that concentrate on teaching literacy.

"I think this Government has to spend about $100 million over the next ten years on literacy and remedial reading, have a programme to get around the homes to encourage parents to teach literacy and to build pre-school facilities near, or onto, schools to teach literacy."

He said it might mean spending $10 million every year. "We must have a facility in every parish, two in Pembroke, Devonshire and possibly in Somerset not nursery school but pre-school literacy training schools."

Such a programme would fill gaps if the parents were falling down.

"If we don't do that, then ten years from now, we will be so embarrassed competitively with the rest of the world because we will have a dumb, ill-informed population because, believe me, the rest of the world is doing exactly what I have said.

"All of the Nordic countries, most of Europe even the United States, is beginning to spend more on pre-school literacy training."

And attention needed to be paid to the environment in which children grow up, said Mr. Edness, who quoted the recent case of a youngster in trouble with the authorities who was failing at school with reported problems of numeracy and literacy.

"The father said, 'I don't know why we are having this conversation, he can count all my money in the middle of the night'.

"It turns out he is counting drug earnings that the father brings in, each and every evening.

"That child obviously is going to be a drugs tsar when he grows up as well. But that is the environment kids are growing up in.

"You cannot put all the blame on schools and teachers.

"Until parents – and I will be terribly criticised for this – realise that they have to take responsibility and a keen interest in teaching and rearing their children in the correct environment, then the gang problem is going to get worse and worse and worse."

Government also should play a role in ensuring that home environments improved, argued Mr. Edness, who said the Child Development Project was supposed to go into every home to see how every child lived.

"That's not working, we need to have someone go in and help the parent learn how to bring up the child in the proper environment."

He said working class, dual-income families found it hard enough and single moms were finding it impossible.

"I don't mean this in a derogatory manner but a high percentage of the children who suffer illiteracy come from single-parent and low-income homes.

"This is contributing to the big economic gap in this country.

"Somewhere around 30 percent of children are born out of wedlock here.

"According to US statistics, 80 percent of such children will fail they will become a problem to the state when they get into their teens."

Mr. Edness said 60 percent of girls born out of wedlock were likely to repeat the pattern with more illegitimate kids, while US statistics also showed that 70 percent of prisoners can barely read to grade four level.

"If you did a study here you would find possibly 80 percent of inmates are illiterate.

"That's the problem reflecting itself in the streets, drugs give people who can't get a decent job the opportunity to earn a lot of money from selling drugs.

"You can't blame Police, they will never keep up. Let's cut it off by educating the people so they have opportunities."

Recently The Royal Gazette ran an interview with gang members who told of how they had turned to selling drugs because of the lack of other opportunities.

"Everybody said these boys have choices, but did they really?" questioned Mr. Edness.

"One of the things they said is they can't get a decent job because they are not educated, they can't read.

"The system failed those boys.

"Until we recognise that instead of pointing the finger and saying they had choices and recognise the system failed a lot of other children, then we will get nowhere."