Rising poverty and huge drug profits are fuelling the gang and gun scourge says family campaigner Sheelagh Cooper.

And she believes radical solutions such as legalising cannabis and slashing housing costs are needed to reverse a problem which has been building for years.

With Bermuda reeling from violent clashes which have seen people shot dead in the street she said the Island was reaping a "perfect storm" of factors with generations of family problems mixing with newer economic threats. Mrs. Cooper, who is head of the Coalition for the Protection of Children, said the basic theories on why people join gangs are well known poverty, absent fathers and young emotionally-distant mothers.

It leads young people to seek a surrogate family through gang membership which provides social and emotional support, protection, status, recognition, affirmation all the things those young men and women are lacking.

While Bermuda has always had single moms with disconnected fathers and the rates of children born out of wedlock have not changed in 50-plus years, Mrs. Cooper said other changes over the last 15 years had a profound effect on creating "the perfect storm".

She told The Royal Gazette: "The tipping point is that poverty is at an all-time high.

"Never has it cost so much to survive in Bermuda and never has there been such a gap between the very wealthy and the very poor.

"And, worst of all, never have the wages for semi or unskilled labour been so out-of-whack with the actual cost of living."

It meant unskilled moms must have two jobs to pay the rent and so are obviously not at home with their children.

It also meant that grandmothers who used to watch the children when mom was at work are no longer available as they need to carry on working to survive, said Mrs. Cooper.

"Many of our children are highly stressed and you have mothers with multiple jobs, many of whom are unprepared to nurture and raise an infant."

She said studies on monkeys show that infant monkeys who are deprived of maternal nurturing became depressed and easily turned violent as they grew older.

"There are poverty factors that didn't exist before."

Add in the availability of drugs and the huge profits from selling them then it makes it useful for dealers to recruit gang members to build the equivalent of a family business.

"A gang is essentially a family and has many of the positive attributes of a family, particularly if you are desperate for one.

"So while the regular predictors of violence and gang behaviour have existed in Bermuda for some time, the reason we are seeing a big increase in the problem has to do with the above noted changes."

So any programme to reduce violence must tackle poverty said Mrs Cooper. "Start by making sure that every child is fed properly, beginning in the morning. Hungry kids can't learn," she said.

This is why the Coalition has expanded its 'breakfast for every child' programme to three more schools next month.

"We are doing that because the research from our programme last year at Victor Scott indicated as much as a 60 percent increase in test scores in some cases. This is very basic, but it is a start."

The Coalition also helps moms who have no food. "Again, a small thing but it means a whole lot to a hungry child."

Homelessness is a big problem which needs to be addressed, said Mrs. Cooper.

"How does a young boy not end up angry and alienated when he and his mom and his younger siblings are moving constantly from relative to relative or friend to friend?

"How does he do his homework when there is no corner to call his own or perhaps no electricity in the shortened days of November and December?"

Basic affordable housing should be viewed as a right, not a privilege, said Mrs. Cooper.

It could be provided either by living wage legislation, meaning that hourly wages were set to allow a worker to make enough money in a 40 to 50-hour week to be able to afford to live.

"Or Government could either effectively control rental costs or subsidise those costs."

Controversially Mrs. Cooper believes Bermuda's drug laws need to be loosened in certain areas. She said: "This will sound like complete heresy, but it's time to think very seriously about de-criminalising marijuana. Why? Because if you take the profit out of it you reduce the crime associated with it.

"And, unthinkable as it may seem to many, it would actually reduce the number of young people who move on to much more dangerous drugs because they are unable to get their drug of choice.

"This will seem counter intuitive to most people – how do we reduce violence by de-criminalising marijuana? And their reaction will be understandable."

But she said the vast amounts of money saved by chasing down dealers selling weed could now be spent providing effective programmes for those with addiction problems.

"We have yet to fully fund and support enough addiction treatment and aftercare programs for addicts in Bermuda.

"When I was on the Parole Board more than 80 percent of the inmates were detained for drug-related crimes and yet there was a very small portion of the prison population involved in any sort of drug treatment."

Young people needed something to do, argued Mrs. Cooper who would like a boarding school for boys, offering sport and music, to keep them away from the town and country feuds.

"I am not talking about a training school. I am talking about an opportunity for kids before they reach the point of requiring intervention from the legal system."

Without it young people expelled or suspended from school at 14 or even younger would simply be "perfect gang material".

The other alternative is Westgate's Co-Ed facility which Mrs. Cooper described "as close to a training ground for future criminal activity as one can get".

She added: "For the younger children, it's time we all got together and began a big fund raiser to create the equivalent of a YMCA a large facility open to all, regardless of their ability to pay. "The evidence in North America indicates facilities like that reduce crime significantly within a certain numbers of miles radius."

And Mrs. Cooper wishes Government would return to supporting conflict resolution and peer mediation which the Coalition runs in schools.

"Fortunately as a result of very good corporate support we have been able to continue to provide the programme in most schools.

"The research is very clear about the extent to which the program impacts the student's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts."

Mrs Cooper concedes her wish list of social policies might seem very remote from the burning issue of tackling the gun violence and murder on Bermuda's streets.

"But there is at least a ten-year lag here and we are seeing the results of a pattern established ten years or more ago.

"We need to be thinking about what our little six, seven and eight-year-old boys and girls will be doing in 10 years time."

* The Royal Gazette has now written four articles this week about the root causes of violence and crime. What do you think are the causes and what can people do? Email us at news@royalgazette.bm or leave a comment on our Facebook page.