Social Affairs Ministry axes at-risk girls` pre-military service project
Social workers: Program is often last chance for girls involved to integrate into society rather than becoming a burden on it.
By Ruth Sinai Tags: IDFThe Social Affairs Ministry recently canceled a program that successfully prepared 250 at-risk girls each year for army service - even as the government decries the growing trend toward draft evasion.
The ministry decided to divert the program's budget, NIS 1.2 million a year, to fund preparations for coping with emergency situations such as last summer's war.
The discontinued project was a joint venture between the Israel Defense Forces, the Social Affairs Ministry, the Industry, Trade and Employment Ministry and the WIZO organization. The Social Affairs Ministry's contribution was paying the salaries of the 10 social workers who ran it.
Over the last few months, WIZO has pressed the ministry to restore the program's funding, but thus far, it has offered only NIS 400,000, or about a third of its former contribution.
WIZO is now frantically looking for alternative funding that would allow it to open the program as planned on September 1. However, it is also insisting that the ministry promise to fund it again completely in 2009 - a promise the ministry has thus far refused to make.
Municipal social workers have also been lobbying the ministry on the issue: It recently received a letter of protest signed by coordinators of programs for at-risk girls from every local authority in the country.
In their letter, the social workers stressed that the army-preparation program is often a last chance for the girls involved to integrate into society rather than becoming a burden on it.
The program is aimed at girls from the age of 17.5 through 19.5 whom the army has declined to draft due to their problematic personalities and behavior. It offers them tutoring to help them complete their high-school degree, professional training at a vocational school in fields ranging from computer graphics to hairdressing, and workshops on topics such as empowerment, building self-image, social integration and interpersonal communication.
After completing the nine-month program, the girls volunteer and are accepted for army service, and the program's social workers then mentor them during their service.
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I see you live in Minnesota and have nothing to do with your life but surf a Jewish website and plant your vile little steaming messes in every thread. Well done, loser.
If each girl who completes this program goes on to serve in the army and subsequently lead a normal life the initial cost to the tax payer will be recouped. The girls will become women, they will work, pay taxes, raise families and contribute to society. Without a program like this some of these girls will end up leading deeply dysfunctional lives. The old demons of drug and alcohol abuse, crime, prostitution, battered and neglected children, prison and suicide are always lurking in the background. The ongoing cost to the taxpayer of those who take the route of self destruction is immeasureably higher. It is better to spend money on people like this when they are still at a malleable age and use the army as a tool to give discipline, structure and self esteem. The future alternative is to spend money on more prisons and for all of us to accept a poorer quality of life as crime rates rise. Schemes to help troubled youth serve as soldiers should be expanded not closed.
Of a militaristic state on the state's ability to provide social services bodes ill for Israel's future, in many areas--Holocaust survivor benefits, and so forth. Israel is not alone in this trap. Witness the US.