A PSYCHOLOGIST has criticised calls for graffiti vandals to be classed as mentally ill and jailed.
Aaron Hayes, the director of PNG Counselling and Care, was responding to a report in The National that Government health officers had described graffiti vandals as having a mental disorder.
“Graffiti vandals, by and large, are not mentally ill,” he said in a statement.
“They are somebody’s kids getting up to no good because they are not properly supervised.
“You would be surprised to learn that it is your neighbour’s son, your nephew or your own brother.
“The last thing we want to do is throw kids in jail with hardened criminals just because they have scribbled on a fence,” he said.
Mr Hayes said when he first came to Port Moresby 10 years ago, there was very little graffiti around the city.
He said it was a recent phenomenon that required proper research to determine its origins and understand the psychology behind it and come up with an effective way of dealing with it.
“Contrary to popular belief, most graffiti vandals are probably not raskols or uneducated settlement youth,” he said.
“The true culprits are boys from the educated social classes that are either still in school or have left school.”
Mr Hayes said this was supported by the following:
*The handwriting is usually well-formed and artistic indicating that the vandal is a practised writer;
*Most graffiti tags feature some form of word-play or deliberately-corrupted spelling that requires advanced familiarity with the English language to conceive of;
*Graffiti is commonly sprayed in middle class and industrial areas of the city and particularly in streets surrounding schools;
*The high cost of the spray paint, large felt-top markers and so on which makes graffiti an unlikely pursuit for unemployed street kids; and
*Graffiti spray cans are easily concealed in school bags and small backpacks frequently carried by young men of the educated class where else criminal youths rarely carry or wear bags or backpacks.
Mr Hayes said the graffiti problem had now reached “plague proportions” but the local government authorities had done very little to address it.
“Which PNG city has carried out anti-graffiti awareness programmes in its schools or has restricted the sale of spray cans to minors?
“Which city has engaged a security company to conduct covert surveillance of popular graffiti spots to catch them in the act or established a reporting hotline?”
Mr Hayes said his company had submitted a proposal to the NCDC three times over the past 12 months to fund a research study on the graffiti problem but had not received any show of interest.