The Department of Rehabilitation/Welfare Services is today better equipped for their challenging work because of a comprehensive social study which had been carefully documented and was last week presented to representatives of the Department and the Government of The Bahamas.

The 184-page study, "The Phenomenological Essences of the Arrested Male Youths in their Relationships with their Parents " was a March 2006 dissertation by Dr Earl Anthony White, as partial fulfilment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Capella University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

As part of the research Dr White, son of Bahamian journalist P. Anthony White, with the cooperation of the Department of Rehabilitation/Welfare Services, last year conducted studies of eight youths, ages raging from 13 to 21 years, most of them residents of the Simpson C. Penn Centre for Boys in New Providence.

The study explored the experiences of the young males, each of whom had at some point been arrested, with emphasis on their relationships with their parents, with findings intended to assist in the development of training programmes and intervention strategies for those working with such challenged youths.

In an abstraction from the study, Dr. White, who resides in the Cayman Islands, notes that, "These results should also aid families in developing a more positive relationship with their male children through early social bonding practises, while deemphasising the labelling pf the child at they developed, which often precludes such a bonding between parent and child during the social and emotional stages of development for the child."

Dr. White expressed special thanks to Mrs. Sharon Facquharson, the Director of The Department of Rehabilitation/Welfare Services, for affording the opportunity for the research to be carried out, and, in particular, expressed gratitude to Superintendent Wrensworth Butler of the Simpson C. Penn Centre for Boys, for his support and cooperation during the study.

Dr. White, who attended Queen's College in New Providence in the 1970s, will in due course return to The Bahamas for the formal presentations of hardbound copies of the study to the Minister of Social Services, and the Deputy Prime Minister, who has responsibility for National Security.