Currently in Kenya, the family unit is facing a challenge. According to a paper published in 2019 by Ndirangu Ngunjiri, titled 'Fatherless Children and Crime Rates in Kenya', virtually every major pathology has been linked to fatherlessness.
Violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy and suicide, all correlate more strongly to fatherlessness than any other single factor. To this we may add vulnerability to joining terrorist groups such as al Shabaab and Daesh.
According to statistics from the Kenya National Housing and Population Census of 2019, homes headed by single parents went up from 25 percent to 40 percent between 2009 and 2019.
Anecdotal evidence from the arrest of Kenyans suspected to have joined al Shabaab in Somalia indicates that the majority came from dysfunctional homes. This was either with absentee fathers, abusive or alcoholic or where the father had also joined the group.
Children from such backgrounds are vulnerable to outside forces due to the absence of stable and reliable guidance from right-thinking adults, in this case their parents.
Families that have a father and mother who are physically present and able to provide mentorship and guidance within the family unit have decreased over time. In addition, a majority of homes lack a stable, physically and emotionally present father figure or role model, which may be due to a range of reasons.
These include but are not limited to the death of a parent/guardian, divorce or separation of the parents and one or both parents walking away from the family unit leaving the children behind. In cases where both parents are alive and physically present in their children's lives, there is a breakdown in how the adults relate with their young ones.
This has created an environment where children and parents are not able to communicate and interact in healthy ways. Likewise, parents are not able to positively influence the character of their children and they are also not able to inspire positive characteristics in them.
Increasing cases of reports made of underage youths engaging in drugs and alcohol consumption as well as reported cases of young people involved in criminal activities such as robbery and other petty crimes can be considered one of the indicators of a breakdown in the family unit.
A study carried out in 2019 within Kenya's main prisons found that at least 46 percent of all inmates were fatherless or came from broken homes, which in turn contributed to their tendency towards crime. Further afield, researchers say that fathers need to be made aware of the negative consequences of their absence from their families.
Those who were victims of recruitment to terror groups but were lucky enough to escape terrorist training camps back to safety in Kenya have given a few reasons that influenced them into accepting recruitment.
They are majorly but not limited to, a deep need for a collective identity, an inherent need to experience a sense of belonging as well as being influenced by some family members that they looked up to, something that they said was lacking within their homes.
In their mission to win more recruits, terrorists have identified these voids that the young people are left with that lead to the estrangement of children and parents in the family unit. They continue to take advantage of this gap by charmingly selling to the young souls a false sense of identity and belonging.
They have also mastered techniques of interacting with youth that make them feel seen, heard and understood by adults, something the youth desire. This has lured many to their eventual fatal demise once they join the fight by these terror groups, a vice made easier by the advancing social media space and easy access to mobile devices.
Psychologically, a broken home can disrupt how a child develops into the youth and eventually adult stage of their life. When they grow up lacking physical and emotional stability that ought to be created by their parents, they turn out to be individuals who are unstable and thus vulnerable to external influence, more so the negative kind.
All developing human beings have an inherent need for guidance or mentorship. When this is not available in their home environment, the individual will gravitate towards whoever else offers it and this is where the negative external influence comes in.
In a healthy home or family set-up, the parents provide both emotional and physical support to their children. This enables them to develop a healthy structure that goes on to stabilise their character and build resilience to negative influence once they are out of the home environment and interacting with the rest of the world.
As Kenyans, we can contribute to the fight against terrorism by first of all securing our children from the influence of recruiters. Parents need to have frequent deliberate interactions with their children. This entails being emotionally available, giving sound guidance and advice when they raise a concern as opposed to criticising or condemning and violently disciplining a child when a mistake is made.
Being physically present in their lives to give guidance on mundane day-to-day life events also goes a long way in helping the child have a sense of stability. This also creates a viable environment for parents to influence their children on their interactions with society as their character has a stable development background.
By deliberately making interactions with children a daily activity, parents can identify areas in their children that show weakness and shortcomings in character and correct them in time.
To win the war on terrorism and secure our country and society, we need a whole-of-society approach. As our security forces work tirelessly to fight off terrorist groups and secure our country, we as parents also need to play our part by ensuring that our children do not become the enemy our soldiers are fighting.
