Teen curfew

Categories: Singapore
The Singapore Police recently announced that the police may report teens under 17 years old to their parents if they are found loitering in public places after 11pm. Police will send parents letters stating when and where their children were spotted as well as the contact number of the nearest police post which parents can call for more information. According to the Police, they have noticed an increase in the number of robberies, snatch thefts and rioting cases where youths are the targets. On the surface, this come as something useful and a preemptive move to prevent any crime or to prevent teens from mixing with the wrong company. But how practical or realistic is it?

From the parents point of view, this is indeed welcome. Now there is an added safety net for the children. Delving deeper, there are at least three broad groups of parents.

The first group are those with 'good' parenting skills. Good is in inverted commas because the parenting skill is good simply because it works, No magic formula to be applied to all. Children of such parents usually poses no problem to their parents. They are likely to inform their parents where they are and are most unlikely to be out and about after 11pm. So, no issues here.

The second group of parents are those that cannot handle their children. They have problem coping or controlling the children. Their children generally do not care to listen to these parents. For these parents, one wonders how useful is it for the Police to inform them of the whereabouts of their children because even if they wanted to do something, they probably could not. They would have probably tried to prevent their children from staying out late but to no avail.
However, this group may benefit in the sense that maybe for once they know exactly what their children is up to at night. And maybe such liason with the Police may open an avenue for the parents and their children for counselling which till now may not be known to the parents.

The third group of parents are those that are too busy to take care of the children. For this group of parents, they tend to leave their children alone, usually without much guidance. To these parents, even with the Police notification, will it make any difference to them? Maybe they will just brush it off saying the children are not in any trouble so why bother.

What about the children? Good obedient children has little needs to stay out this late. Even those with tuition rarely has to stay out till 11 pm. The occasional midnight movie would probably have the parents permission. Therefore, their parents already knows their whereabout, and so such policing is redundant.

To the problemed teens, such measure may seen as a lack of trust on the part of the State and the parents. They may feel that they are unfairly targeted and their 'freedom' curtailed. This may make them even more rebellious and worsen an already difficult situation for the parents. What is worse is that some of these teens may go to places that are less frequented so as to hide
themselves from the Police. This may be counter-productive because this may increase their chances of being robbed, etc. With the open-minded teens nowadays, such places may also increase the likelihood of intimacy between the sexes as now they are away from public scrutiny.

Although such measures by the Police is laudable, this step may be seen as interference by the State. Already the State has 'interfered' into individual lives when they encourage the people to get married and have children. Now with this the Police monitoring the teens, what next? The State simply cannot be seen to act like a nanny!

Already parenting nowadays are mostly in remote control mode - most of the time parents are busy working and the children minding is either left to the grandparents, childcare or even maids. It is feared that with such action by the Police, some parents may be even more lax with child-minding as there is a sort of safety net in place for them. Now they may even spend less time with the kids.

Because of a rather efficient government, Singaporeans had come to expect a lot from the State. They tend to be rather quick to speak up if things doesn't measure up. Therefore, by committing to police the teens, they are opening up another 'source' for complaints when teens gets into trouble. This may use up valuable manpower to answer complaints when these can be better utilised to safeguard the society against terrorisms.

It is good to know that the Police are trying to prevent teens from getting into trouble by such a pre-emptive move. However how practical it is remains to be seen.