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Local News: Growing up without a father Black Habits Articles can set youth up for a violent life and an early death. A member of the black community writes about remedies.

Amon Beckles and Jamal Hemmings had a lot in common. Beckles, 18, and Hemmings, 17, were best friends, tough guys who came from low-income Toronto neighbourhoods. They had fathered children. Perhaps the strongest bond of all, they had grown up fatherless.

Tragically, they also had death in common. Hemmings was killed Nov. 9 in a west-end parking lot. Beckles was gunned down at Hemmings' funeral on Nov. 18.

Toronto has experienced a stunning wave of gang violence that some say is inexplicably bold and callous. But at least one man who works with the city's black youth understands better than most why some of them are living a life of crime and violence, why they, and innocent bystanders, are dying in such great numbers.

The common thread, says Pastor Bruce Smith, is the absence of fathers and the feelings of powerlessness and frustration that breeds.

Smith's seen it all before. The stories of snuffed-out young lives today in Toronto bear an eerie resemblance to the stories of his friends, many of whom lost their lives to gang wars and crime.

"They equated power with respect," he says, "(and) money with power." Smith spent his youth in Huntsville, Texas, but says the common denominator with Toronto's problem is young people growing up without a father or a father figure. Like the youth of today, his friends were trying to make up for what they were lacking.

"The reason they did it is because they felt, like me, powerless. As a young kid, you need that security, so if you don't have it, you will try to create it, by being tough, by being mean, being part of a gang. That's how it happens."

Smith, who grew up to become a CFL superstar with the Argonauts and in 2000 joined the King-Bay Chaplaincy, based in the Toronto-Dominion Centre, is among those who are trying to help the black community change the dynamic around being fatherless and create a more constructive environment, particularly by providing father figures for youth at risk.

Rev. Al Bowen has been working in Toronto housing projects for six years and estimates more than 90 per cent are single-parent families, and the vast majority of single-parent families are headed by women. "Here, the mother is not at home, (she's) doing a minimum-wage job," he says. "The kids are being raised by older brothers, by sisters, BET and MuchMusic.

"We become what we eat and we also become what we take into the mind and we become what our friends are."

Smith finds a similar situation in Sparrow Way, the housing project in northeast Toronto developed by the King-Bay Chaplaincy where he ministers to young men. He estimates 80 per cent of mothers there are raising their children without a father, but there are men in these women's lives who are doing more harm than good.

"A number of these single women also have boyfriends who are abusing their children. Lots of these kids have stuff happen to them.

"But how can a young kid say, `I'm being abused'? They get a gun and say, `I'm going to kill somebody.'"

Willingness to commit violence is only part of the problem. The casual nature of some of the violence in Toronto has been particularly horrifying. On Boxing Day, 15-year-old Jane Creba was killed in a shootout while shopping on Yonge St. In another case, a youth was killed in a dispute about a cellphone.

Researchers can link this kind of callousness to the absence of a father. "The single most important childhood factor in developing empathy is paternal involvement," says a landmark report on the subject, which was published in 1990.

The report's authors, Richard Koestner, Carol Franz and Joel Weinberger, conducted a 26-year study of 379 individuals and found that fathers who spent time alone with their kids, performing routine child care at least two times a week, raised children who were the most compassionate adults of the group studied.

Conversely, says University of Toronto criminology professor Scot Wortley, the effects of being fatherless can lead to several negative behaviours, particularly in low-income single-parent homes.

Even if there is a bond with the mother, says Wortley, "with no male role models, there is often gravitation toward the worst stereotypes of masculinity and they adopt what they see in the media, which often are extremes of masculine behaviour."

Wortley adds that some youth are quick to use guns as a sign of masculinity "and try to get young women pregnant as a sign of virility and control."

Other research traces the general disadvantages faced by children who grow up without fathers.

INGRID WALTER SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Posted on Thursday, January 12 @ 00:00:00 UTC by jcohen



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