Earlier this year, we made a big fuss about the Government of Jamaica’s crime plan. I was asked 17 times to comment on this plan – though I am not a criminologist. This is because in Jamaica, crime and violence are treated as the same.
Countries with very high violence cannot have comparably high crime rates. This is because violence is so graphic that it forces the populace to forget about other crimes. Once your violence goes down, people will report other crimes more. So we need a higher crime rate and a lower violence rate. Funny but true.
Caribbean people are good at plans – they are simply very poor at implementation. Jamaica, Belize and Trinidad desperately need a violence-reduction plan (not a crime plan) – and then to ensure that these are implemented.
Violence is a by-product of social ills. Put another way, it is the result of a set of social problems. For Caribbean people, these problems are related to the fact that we did poorly transitioning from being colonised to being independent. We have not addressed the core requirements for being a stable society, and we have carried over the same oppressive styles of achieving social order.
Let me illustrate. In 1829 (190 years ago), the London Police Force was created with a focus on modern policing (community-oriented, rather than paramilitary). For the past two decades, I have been involved in several meetings and workshops about modernising our police force. In the first decade, much was achieved. In the second, we have worked desperately hard to reverse some of the achievements of the first, as we are again relying on military and paramilitary combinations as our core response to a developmental problem.
The main problem is that governments do not understand that violence and development problems are almost always the same. When you examine their taglines or projects, it becomes clear to you that they see the violence as an isolate. Policymakers who are going to make a difference cannot afford to miss the fact that our behaviour is as a result of a brutal past that we find convenient to continue.
Some years ago, I sat in a meeting in Belize to discuss violence reduction. The policymakers decided to name the secretariat designed to reduce violence ‘Restore Belize’. Immediately, locals pointed out that they do not wish to restore anything: “We were slaves; we wish to become independent thinkers and chart our own way forward.” In Jamaica, we have done the same.
Policymakers always speak of returning to the social order the country once enjoyed. Who enjoyed it? Certainly not the people. The homicide rate before Independence was below four per 100,000. This looks good on paper. It is, therefore, not surprising that five different student studies have found that more than a third of Jamaicans wish to return to being a colony of Britain. Note that the governments of the region and the people are the same. Using oppression or suppression is familiar. Not everyone wants to launch or become genuinely independent. Oppression worked effectively on us; then, oppression it is.
Recently, my Caribbean culture class went to Weddy-Weddy Wednesday in Half-Way Tree, a weekly dancehall event hosted by Stone Love. At 11:30 p.m., a few students asked me: “Sir, are you watching this?” I asked, “Watching what?” Despite them being only students, and lacking advanced body reading skills, they could see that by 11:15, the people stopped responding normally to the DJ who was playing his very best hits. The group depression was obvious.
One non-Jamaican student was very philosophical as she assessed the situation. “This must be how slavery was. You live in oppression. You get a small break. Then you hear the whistle blow, and you know it is back to the cane fields,” she said.
For the next 30 minutes, the richness of the music was met with depression. People who knew nothing about the impending gloom started walking about. One man uttered, “Well, it’s back to crime for me now. This thing is not long enough to make money fi more than one baby mother”. By the time the flashing lights signalled the end of the session and the beginning of “What do I do for the rest of the night?”, people had started angry conversations aimed at anything and anyone, including the Government of Jamaica.
Then, a few students started shouting to others, “The black session turn off. Mek we head to the brown one now”. When others asked for directions to the ‘brown’ session, they were directed to New Kingston, only walking distance away. I tried to calm my students, but I could not help but see the old divide-and-rule slavery technique at work.
Why are Caribbean governments so adamant on holding on to socially divisive and oppressive colonial techniques? Why are they not eager to listen to their own experts? Note that battered children not only beat others because they are transferring the aggression; they also do it because of the efficacy of violence. Violence is powerful and is an extremely effective as a tool of control. Frantz Fanon (1963, Wretched of the Earth) spoke eloquently about how colonised people are good at oppressing their own people – because they learnt it from their colonisers.
When I studied violence in England, one of my classes assessed the risk taken to launch the new socially-oriented London Police Force in 1829. People were obviously scared to launch. They knew of the efficacy of paramilitary strikes, and often went back to it prematurely when the new system of community policing faltered, but they had a core of persons who saw it through. Today, London police are revered by most violence experts and security scholars.
Change is hard, and it is even harder when violence is involved. Ask the teachers of the top primary schools who continued to flog students quietly after it was banned in the region. I had meetings with two schools in Jamaica and Belize that had continued to use violence to achieve top grades. I saw tears in the eyes of teachers as I showed them alternatives. The tears increased as I further explained that it would take a while for the new techniques of discovery and rewards to take off. Results could suffer. “But the parents will not understand,” they lamented.
Such a crisis will emerge as we try to do something sustainable. The same applies to the Government of Jamaica. How can we ask the Government to change when elections are approaching? It is, certainly, unfair and unrealistic. Imagine what would happen if the Government tried to launch. The homicide rate would soar. The pressure cooker lid must be kept on. However, after this election, we must return to the discussion of starting the process of reducing violence in Jamaica.
This means that we must have them on the agenda before the election – with an aim to get a promise out of both parties to begin a multisectoral violence reduction programme. Remember that humans are aggressive for the purpose of hunting and protection. We do not allow a large number of people to misbehave outside the frame of looking food and protecting family and self. Read Richard Dawkins’ (1976) work on the Selfish Gene. Think about it. We tend to allow taxi drivers and unmarked cars with hazard lights flashing to break the rules on the road because they are addressing the two central reasons for aggression. Aggression is necessary; violence is not as necessary.
If violence is a by-product, you will need to address the social ills – not the symptoms. What are the main social ills in Jamaica? We can divide them into physiological or primary, intermediate and upper unmet needs.
- Primary needs: food, clothing, shelter, and sanitation. All of these areas are problematic for at least one-fifth of Jamaicans. Fewer than one-tenth of Jamaicans live in what we describe as inner cities. In 1998, Chevannes and Gayle found that a third of them had very poor or no sanitary facilities. Recent checks on some of the worst communities show that after 20 years, very little has been done. The findings of the 1998 study show that when people are hungry and frustrated, they litter the gullies more and fight more.
- Intermediate needs: employment and training. An unpublished study of men across Jamaica for the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work shows that currently 42 per cent of men are either unemployed or marginally employed (have no stable job, outside the formal economy, or work as labourers as they have no marketable skill). Picture suppression working effectively when two of five men over the age of 16 have no guarantee of food for self or family.
In Belize, this proportion is over 50 per cent. In wealthy Trinidad, the situation is not as bad – but the impact is similar as the men there have to deal with the fact that they are hungry among the wealthiest people in the region.
This is the feeling of men of this group who reside in proximity to extreme wealth in Jamaica. The dilemma for Jamaican men is that for a very long time, they relied on the reality that most of our economy was based on labour-intensive heavy industries. For years they were ‘spoilt’ by these realities. Today, the shift to service industries that depend on cognition and training has been dramatic. Women make up two-thirds of those ready for this change (see Patricia Anderson’s work). To make matters worse, while the feminist movement has helped women to be ready for the change, only 18 per cent of women in Jamaica partner with men, and only 21 per cent of men understand or have experienced partnership (Gayle 2014).
Partnership means sharing resources and respecting each other equally. So a large proportion of men are left behind with no source to be a man (as defined by patriarchy). Yet fewer than one in five Jamaicans has made the transition to partnership. Kindly note that calling the behaviour of these displaced men toxic does not solve the problem. Social transition is needed, and it requires academic partnership to achieve the social partnership.
- Upper needs: ontological security. More than a fifth of men in recent studies have no idea about tomorrow. These are good candidates for gang war and domestic violence. Almost all (98 per cent) fell into the group of men who were untrained. In other words, the men who had some degree of training had high levels of ontological security – even most of whom were temporarily unemployed. Not only must men (who account for 90 per cent of our violence) have access to food and a stable home, but they must have a sense that they can do so over a prolonged period. This is why scammers buy up guns (if they are uneducated) and buy up property (if they are educated). They know that the scamming is short term.
The country cannot move forward without massive investment in education and training. Today, men make up less than a third of tertiary enrolment in Jamaica – yet they pay for 84 per cent of all tuitions. Even if they have dollars – but no sense – we will still have immense violence. Men must become exposed to the quality education that affords them a place in the country’s service-oriented future. Until then, there will be war!
Herbert Gayle, PhD, is an anthropologist of social violence.
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