RIYADH, 20 March 2003 — Of late, crime as a whole, especially homicide, is on the increase in Saudi Arabia. Scary statistics and hair-raising details of horrible crimes have become part of daily life.
Analysts attribute the troubling criminal graph to the population boom, quick social changes and the individual criminal’s psychological, social and economic problems. The people are totally confused; they don’t understand how crimes keep rising in a Muslim society.
Al-Riyadh daily, which tried to find the reasons and motives behind the rising crime wave, suggests that as citizens we should band together to find solutions for the unpleasant situation.
There are motives behind each crime. Not every criminal is insane and not every murderer is sane.
Crimes hit the headlines: A young man stabs his mother to death, Unemployed man kills his wife and brother, Young man fires shots at his uncle, Overstayer kills Saudi — all these are commonplace.
Al-Riyadh asked psychiatrist Dr. Abdullah Al-Sobaie if insanity and criminality were interlinked. He refused to link all crimes taking place in our society to insanity. “It is not necessary for one to be insane to commit a crime. There are personal reasons that prompt people to commit homicides. “It could be the nature of the person to be highly emotional and reckless. He does not think about what he is going to do before he commits a crime. He could be under the influence of drugs. Some people also have a built-in tendency to be hostile toward society,” Sobaie said.
Dr. Saad Al-Dehayan, a sociology teacher at King Saud University, attributed the crime wave to many factors. “The main reason is drug abuse, which is directly and indirectly connected to crimes. Drugs control the way users think. Under the influence of drugs, they can kill their father, mother or brother. They are not fully in control of their actions when they are under the influence of drugs,” he said.
Another factor is economic. When a man is unemployed for a long time and cannot support his family, he tends to do anything to overcome the situation. Suicide is a common way of ending life elsewhere in the world. Killing members of the family is another outlet for some.
A third factor is the blind imitation of what one sees on satellite TV channels and movies that are full of scenes of violence and crimes. There are people who get easily influenced by these, especially children who have started taking weapons to school.
Al-Dehayan said: “As for our Saudi society, we see motives that never existed before. It is because we mix with other cultures. The fast changes we see in our society — and I would say negative changes — contribute much to the increasing crime rate we see around here. Unfortunately, we cannot control it. It is the responsibility of the family who allow their children to see all kinds of unsocial and anti-social scenes on satellite channels.
“Foreign workers who are present in large numbers in our midst have brought many social diseases into our society. Our society is caught between a riot of cultures, satellite channels and spiritual weakness. All these factors contribute to criminality.
“I think many worse things will happen in the future because our society is neglecting these factors and not trying to find solutions to them. The authorities must step in and put an end to it. “We have to change our school curriculum. We have to change the way children are taught at schools. We also have to control the satellite channels and bar sick programs from television.”
