By THEA RUTHERFORD,Guardian National Correspondent,thea@nasguard.com

Crime has become rampant on Bahamian streets, with citizens everywhere wondering why. When did this seeming explosion of crime occur? And what are the solutions? Is the country too far gone, or is it on the brink of decision, the threshold of deciding whether it will make definitive steps to eradicate crime by understanding why it has increased, or look the other way in fear and denial? This is the second week of The Guardian's examination of the root causes of crime through a three-part series. Part three - a look at the role of education in the face of rising crime - will run on Feb. 18.

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The family gasps for air as crime strangles its role in society.

What if we did it this way: If there's a child in trouble, a kid at risk for criminal activity that may eventually lead to an early and violent death, we catch him as he careers toward the cliff looming ahead. We catch him and have each layer of society blanket him in support, helping him to understand who he is and what his purpose in life is. We listen to him.

And what if we did this for every child. Utopia? Maybe. Possibility?

Possibly.

It's a society that at least one former guidance counselor can envision. Explaining this imagined society where children are guided on their strengths and taught to use them to repair their weaknesses, Patrice Francis says, "We have to rebuild the village."

The idea of rebuilding the village of the African proverb that places the responsibility of raising the child on an entire community is a recurring theme, as society scratches its head in puzzlement and angst over the growing crime problem. Breaking records in all the wrong categories, the country's murder and rape rates - at their highest ever last year with 79 murders and 134 rape cases - inspire both fear and shame. Where did we go wrong?

While those digging for answers agree that there is no one root cause of crime, a number of elixir-seekers have settled on one definite contributor - the breakdown of the family unit. What some have called the erosion of the family unit becomes the first domino to fall in the lives of many criminals.

"They don't have families in the sense that families existed [in the past]," says Francis.

"The extended family has changed face in many ways. Grandmothers are now very young and still working, and in some cases stlll going to the disco. Mothers are working shifts so they're not necessarily home. Fathers are absent altogether. A very, very small percentage of the boys with whom I worked ... had fathers in the home. Some didn't know their fathers. Some knew of him but had no relationship. Some lived in the home with their fathers, but the father was still absent because you have fathers who are physically there but emotionally they're absent. So these children are basically bringing up themselves and they are learning from people on the streets how to get ahead."

And with the breakdown of the family structure comes, for many, a loss of the primary institution that builds character in the lives of children, says Fr. Sebastian Campbell.

"Many of our children have no real male role model that was intended to be a live-in role model in terms of living in the home in order to model for them the other side of what it means to be a whole person," says Campbell, an Anglican priest who is also guidance counselor at Program SURE, an alternative school for teen boys with behavioral problems.

"The average Bahamian child doesn't really know what it means to benefit from that love, that affection that really goes into making you a whole person, a whole human being. The saying is so true - everyone has the need to feel needed."

In search of the loving environment that may be lacking at home, says Campbell, some children turn to gangs, attempting to fill in the gap left in its absence. "Gangs really are a response to the fragmentation within family life in a nation."

In a nostalgic nod to the past, not uncommon among the older generation, Rev. Victor Cooper calls the family structure of the 40's and 50's a viable force. "We need to take another look at what we refer to as the family," says Cooper, who is pastor of New Bethany Baptist Cathedral and chaplain for E. P. Roberts Primary School. The chaplaincy program was conceived by the Bahamas Christian Council last year in response to the spate of violent incidences occurring on school campuses.

"It is certainly changing from what God had intended it to be," he says. "The nuclear family is almost extinct ... We have children who are having children and they lack parenting skills. They're unable to rear their children."

A layer of society that heavily covered the lives of people in the times Cooper looks back to was the church; but the church today, he says, has failed in supporting the family unit.

"I think we tended to not give emphasis to the family as we ought to. We ran into this position of the empowerment of the person as opposed to the empowerment of the family, and so people, I suspect, kind of went through a selfish mode where 'I want the blessing' replaced 'the blessing for us.' The church needs to again give the attention to the family."

For 30-year-old Raquel Gardiner, the notion of giving primacy to the family cannot be emphasized enough. Gardiner is a full-time worker soon to become counselor at Hope House, a Christian organization founded by Ali McIntosh and geared towards supporting young people as well as providing food and other forms of assistance to those in need.

Gardiner arrived at the house at the end of a journey filled with emotional pot-holes. She was molested for seven years throughout primary school and high school. Her attempts to tell her mother, who was later murdered, never led to her rescue. "She didn't believe me," she says.

At Hope House, Gardiner thinks that her ability to listen to children who may be seen as delinquents because "I've been there," can make a real difference in their lives.

And families, like the one she had to create amongst her siblings after her mother's death, should be there for each other. They should be connected along more than just blood lines but bonds that lead to understanding and real love, which, says 17-year-old Shandia Saunders, an education major at Bahamas Baptist College and a Hope House volunteer, is responsibility.

The connection within the family is a reminder that "we're not by ourselves," says Gardiner, who says that her ability to move past the trauma of her own life comes from her relationship with God. "I just pray that God will take me through it," she says. "That's my song every day."

Even as Bahamian society as it once existed, buttressed by the building blocks of strong families, appears to fade into the mists of time, young people who have heard the yearnings for times past internalize the old memories of others, and ask for the same thing.

I want a society "where you can relate to everybody," says 18-year-old Clement Horton II, another Hope House volunteer and a physics and math major at the College of The Bahamas. "Neighbors aren't really neighbors anymore. You just don't know anybody anymore. I want [a society] where everybody knows everybody. There's no more me, me, me."

Says Saunders, "I want a society where it will be safe enough for my nieces and nephews to walk to the shop down the street."