Celebrity blogger Mia Handshin recently posted an article about Adelaide's "Gang Of 49" Aboriginal youths. I viewed her post as objective and balanced, but I disagree with some of her rhetoric.
She wrote of a youth worker who had offered to take these destructive individuals under his wing. He runs projects aimed at getting them onto a better path in life and he has had success with some of them in the past. She referred to this and other initiatives as being constructive and workable "solutions" to the problem. I find that statement a bit hard to swallow.
'Solutions' is a very trendy but dangerously misleading buzzword. What it actually means in any given context is itself a puzzle with a variety of solutions.
Businesses nowadays sell 'solutions to problems' rather than retailing products and services. We're all familiar with the spin. Many of those solutions are in the Mickey Mouse category while others are complete rip-offs.
You have a solution to a crossword puzzle when you have successfully filled it in, not before. Until then, all you have is a strategy which may or may not work.
To talk of initiatives in relation to crime control as being solutions is totally premature. It is one area of social living where we can't afford to be dazzled by misleading rosy pictures because the roses have thorns that are real and destructive.
We have been offered 'solutions' to crime in the past, yet the torrent of destruction unleashed by wayward youths in recent times suggests that those 'solutions' have been mainly dishwater.
