Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
I was reading my daily newspaper from the UK when I came across a shocking headline: 'Dad at 13'. At first I was surprised and shocked but the more I read, the more I understood how this young boy, whose voice was still not broken, came to make the mistake he made.
The boy came from a family who were too poor to lead a normal life and he had eight siblings, the girl had a number of siblings and the parents of both children couldn't keep track of their children all the time.
What really shocked me is that the boy, 13, and the girl, now 15, were allowed to sleep in the same room calling it a 'sleep over'.
The story has gripped the nation of Great Britain and it has become a topic of constant debate about 'broken Britain'.
There comes a time when we, as a society, have to look at all the corners of the community in order to find the faults and fix them before they are visited on others.
I am not saying that such cases exist in our little island, what with the strict Islamic and conservative rulings, but what I am trying to get at is that we too have a 'broken Bahrain' where there are certain faults in our system that we the youngsters fall easily into only to learn the consequences of our actions a bit too late.
A good example of a fault in our society is the fact that many young adults drive on the roads of the island without any prior training or licence, and even if they did have those two essential factors they still drive as if they own the roads.
What families and authorities fail to recognise is that they must stop treating these issues as if it is just something we teenagers go through in life and should focus only on facing the consequences.
What the little 13-year-old boy did in the UK should have never happened but the problems that happen here should also be avoided before they occur. Let us learn how to avoid trouble before creating it.
