Jamaica’s homicide rate of 36 per 100,000 is not as high as that of world leaders El Salvador, Colombia or South Africa, but it is over three times that of Trinidad, over five times that of the USA and over twenty times that of Britain.

The usual explanations for our high murder rate are poverty and unemployment. But while these are undoubtedly contributing factors, they can not be the full answer. Many poorer societies than Jamaica have far lower homicide levels. One part of the equation that we generally ignore here is family structure. But studies in the USA have shown this to be a critical factor in explaining crime. To quote from “Life Without Father” by David Popenoe

“The relationship between family structure and crime is so strong that controlling for family configurations erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime… Almost anything bad that can happen to a child occurs with much greater frequency to children who live in single-parent families. 60% of America’s rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers and 70% of long-term prison inmates come from fatherless homes... Father absence is a major force behind many issues that dominate the news: crime and delinquency, premature sexuality and out-of-wedlock teen births, deteriorating educational achievement; depression, substance abuse, alienation among teenagers and the growing number of women and children in poverty.”

Jamaica has one of the world’s highest out of wedlock birth rates with over 85% of babies  born to unmarried mothers. But this is not the normal human experience. Marriage and the nuclear family – mother, father and children – are the most universal social institutions in existence. In almost no society has non-marital childbirth been the cultural norm.

Some say a good mother is all a child needs, and maternal love is undisputably the most important formative factor in a human being’s life. The great Napoleon once stated that

“Any good I may have accomplished I attribute to my mother and the excellent principles she instilled in me. I do not hesitate to affirm that the future of a child depends on the mother.”

Yet it is a rare child who does not wish to grow up with both a father and a mother, for the feeling that both male and female influences are needed in raising a child is instinctual. It has been correctly said that there are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents. It is wrong to ostracize children and make them feel guilty for differing from the social norm. Yet the reality that children who grow up with two parents generally have lower rates of dysfunctional behaviour can not be ignored. They are not ‘better’ than children from one parent homes, but their early life experiences are on the whole undeniably more pleasurable.

Statistics show that loss of economic resources accounts for about 50% of the disadvantages associated with single parenthood. Too little parental supervision and involvement and greater residential mobility account for most of the rest. The basic reality is that single mothers simply have less money and less time to spend on their children.

But a lack of active fathers causes societal ills from another side of the equation. Unmarried men who do not father are universally dangers to themselves and society. The crime rate for married fathers is very low. Only 21% of American jail inmates are married compared to about 64 % of the general population. Marriage forces men to master their passions and also encourages the regular work habits and self-sacrifice required to meet the family’s maternal needs.

Wherever large numbers of young, unattached males are concentrated in one place, the probability of social disorder greatly increases. Two trenchant examples are the 19^th century American frontier west and the late 20^th century inner-city ghetto. As USA Senator Daniel Moynihan once observed, a society of unattached males “asks for and gets chaos”.

Jamaica’s high out-of-wedlock birthrate is often said to be a legacy of slavery. Yet according to Thomas Sowell in ‘A Conflict of Visions’, a comprehensive study revealed that "...broken homes and teenage pregnancy were far less common among blacks under slavery and in the generations following emancipation than they are today”. These North American findings would probably apply also to Jamaica. Indeed Jamaican unregistered father percentages over recent decades have gone up, not down. At any rate such arguments of ultimate origin are at best distracting red herrings and at worst excuses for inaction. The problem is now, not then. Whatever its past causes, the dysfunctional family structure is the crux of many of Jamaica’s most pressing problems today.

No one is trying to disparage single parents or their children. Many single mothers raise wonderfully successful children, and nuclear family offspring can grow up to be menaces to society. Yet the facts are clear - if Jamaica had more children raised by both parents we would almost certainly suffer less violent crime. While government policies in this area could never change the Jamaican reality overnight, strictly enforcing statutary rape and child support laws would have some long run effect. As would educational and counseling classes encouraging young men and women to change their normative expectations.

Alfred Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. If we in Jamaica continue to accept absent fatherhood as the norm and pretend that it does children no harm, how can we expect our frightening levels of violent crime to decline?