causes some concern. These laws may be seen as necessary because women and children in Bermuda have to be safe from molestation. However the laws should not be considered in isolation.

Tougher laws in themselves are seldom a deterrent although they sometimes lull the public into thinking that "something is being done''. Some sections of the law being debated are totally warranted and very helpful such as child victims being spared the trauma of a court appearance by being recorded on video and curbing evidence of a victim's sexual experience.

We think that too often Bermuda enacts tough sentences and considers them an answer when the answer really lies in what causes people to commit criminal offences and not in the commission of a criminal offence. Tough sentences are quick and easy to enact. Dealing with causes is long and hard.

As an example, a great deal of the violence against women in Bermuda is domestic and is committed under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The majority of the offences also go unreported. Therefore we think that the enactment of tough sex offence laws has to be coupled with increased efforts to combat the abuse of drugs and alcohol. We seriously doubt that a person under the influence is going to stop to consider the length of a jail sentence before committing an offence. Life does not work that way.

Bermuda should do its best to deal with the perpetrators of these crimes because that is the only long-term way to protect victims and to prevent these horrific events.

We should, in fact, be spending the money we use to keep people in prison for longer periods on the alcohol and drug abuse which is the cause of much of the mayhem in the first place. Locking people up for a long time temporarily appeases some of the public but, more often than not, it returns to them an unreformed sick person who has been brutalised and angered by the jails. Long prison sentences without provisions for rehabilitation increase the problems in the end.

As the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. L. Frederick Wade, told the House of Assembly, "We don't think that long imprisonment does anything to rehabilitate anybody.'' We think that it may well turn a prisoner into a greater problem for the very women and children we seek to protect and want to protect. More often than not the crimes of rape and molestation for which we are increasing sentences have been learned by the perpetrator. Often these are angry people who have themselves been victimised. They will not learn anything but more anger and more bad habits in a jail cell and will return to society with their dysfunction reinforced. A jail cell without treatment simply returns a worse problem to an unsuspecting public.

Abuse is often a learned cycle. "My mother was abused so I will abuse my wife. I was an abused child so it's alright to abuse children. I'm not guilty of rape because I was drunk.'' That behaviour will not just stop in a cell without rehabilitation.