Feeling unsafe in my community is not a good thing because a community is a place where I have to feel at home. Drugs and alcohol make me to feel unsafe in my community and the people ask for money at the shops.

There are many things happening in my community that make me feel unsafe, my neighbours sell drugs so that makes our community have many thieves. The thieves stay in the homes of drug dealers and they are shown houses that have good appliances, so that they can rob these houses. They rob our houses in order to have money to buy drugs. There are many young boys and girls who are robbed of their youth and do not go to school because of drugs.

We have so many taverns in my community. On Friday people have enough money to buy lots of alcohol and they fight and we cannot sleep because of their noise. The owner’s of taverns do not look at age restrictions of selling alcohol – they sell alcohol to people under the age of 18 and by doing that they are breaking the law.

Youth are raped by their fathers, uncles, stepfathers and we do not feel safe when we are raped by members of our families. We are not safe in our families and we can’t trust anyone. When you tell your mother that your father has raped you she never believes you because she love this person a lot. In my community girls are kidnapped by people we know and they rape them, after raping them they kill them and that makes me feel unsafe in my own community. People that we know abuse girls in my community and the community does nothing about it. How can we feel safe when people are not doing anything about it? We will never feel safe in our community and as girls we are always being kidnapped.

It seems like violence is everywhere when it happens in your hood, it is scarier because we should feel the safest in our community. But sometimes this is not the case. Feeling unsafe or physically hurt in your own home or community can leave anyone worried, upset and unable to focus at school. No matter what you’re feeling about being unsafe in your community, it’s important to know that you cannot help everyone in your community.

My advice is that we have a right to feel safe in our communities; we can try by ourselves to make our community a better place. We can do that by reporting the people that do crimes and bad things in our community and that way we can eliminate violence in our communities. The government can also create companies so that people can be educated more about how they can keep the communities safe.