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Published: Sunday | May 1, 2005

HOW DO you describe a society that has the highest murder rate in the world and the highest absentee father rate in the world? The word 'dysfunctional' comes to mind.

Our nightly television news must be the bloodiest on earth. Violence-jaded Jamaicans shrug at the usual litany of bloodshed.

But foreigners are always shocked by the often graphic details of our average four murders a day, not to mention the frequent reports of mob killings by enraged citizens taking the law into their own hands because they have no confidence in the justice system.

And who can blame them, when we regularly hear stories like Linval Thompson being gunned down in rush hour traffic because he testified against men who had murdered his mother and stepfather?

Life seems to have become almost meaningless here, with people being killed over the slightest disagreement.

The other day in 'civilised' Mandeville, a parking space argument between two taxi men ended with one of them being disemboweled with a knife. As the slang says 'a no nutten fa we make duppy!'

POVERTY ALMOST HALVED

I love Jamaica. There is no more beautiful and exuberant country on earth.

But the constant barrage of crime and murder is depressing the hell out of me and increasingly making me wonder if this is the kind of place I want my children to grow up in.

The frightening thing is that the constant slaughter seems to have no definable cause.

It can't just be poverty, for the Jamaican economy is doing well. Thanks to terrorism and the tsunami, tourism is booming.

High commodity prices mean healthy bauxite earnings. Kingston is now one of the busiest container trans-shipment ports in the western hemisphere.

Maybe the rich are getting richer, but World Bank figures say our incidence of poverty almost halved over the past 15 years.

In short, Jamaicans are better housed, better dressed, better fed and have greater access to cars, telephones, running water and electricity than at any time in our history. Yet, for all our material progress, we keep descending into social chaos.

WHY SO MANY DEATHS?

No doubt some of our murders are nominally related to politics. But to me the real question is this ­ why are Jamaicans so willing to kill over party loyalty?

Bombings in Iraq or Palestine make people ask why Sunnis and Shi'ites or Israelis and Palestinians can't learn to live in peace.

But while not justifiable, violent clashes over centuries old religious disagreements or ethnic land disputes are in a sense understandable.

Yet, People's National Party (PNP) and Jamaica Labour PARTY (JLP) supporters are mostly of the same racial stock, speak the same language and practise similar religions. Only their shirt colours differ.

So why does the Spanish Town murder rate dwarf that in Palestine? It's almost killing for the sake of killing. No doubt some of our politicians were guilty of heinous acts in the past. But I'm sure both parties would now do anything they could to end the bloodshed in the Old Capital.

I wish I could share the optimism of those who claim our main problems have political roots. Because then the solution would be simple ­ clean up our politics, elect nice and decent representatives, and watch Jamaica become a Singapore.

Jamaica's problems would surely be easier to deal with if the system was fixed and retooled to better serve people's long-term interests rather than short-term party objectives.

But many countries with far more defective governmental setups have much lower murder levels ­ look at India or Uganda.

It is my firm conviction that Jamaica has the highest homicide rate in the world not because it has a flawed political system, but because we are a dysfunctional society.

CREATING 'DOGHEARTS'

According to famed anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, the principle of legitimacy is not a European or Christian prejudice but amounts to a universal sociological law.

The general societal rule is that no child should be brought into the world without an acknowledging father to act as the custodial male link between the child and the community. The crucial determinant of legitimacy is not legality, a widely varying concept, but the male's public commitment to his child's mother.

With more than half our children having no registered fathers, Jamaica appears an exception to this universal law.

Many Jamaican 'fathers' act only as sperm donors and boast of the number of their children to whose welfare they contribute absolutely nothing. No other country routinely discusses parenthood in such relationship neutral terms as 'baby father' and 'baby mother'.

No other country so readily accepts absent fatherhood. No other country has more than 85 per cent of babies born to unmarried mothers.

No other country conceives and brings up children so carelessly. And no other country has such a high murder rate.

In the May 11 edition of The Star last year, there was a chilling article about a 16-year-old stripper who sat despondently by the roadside for days after the club she worked at was shut down because she had nowhere to go to. She had been shunted around all her life from grandmother to aunt to uncle and never known a stable home.

"Marsha is from one of Jamaica's rural parishes, and when she packed her bags and headed to St. Catherine, she left behind a five-month-old daughter, whom she gave birth to after being raped. She said she intended to give her baby up for adoption when she was born but her grandmother discouraged her and offered to take the child whom she claims she has no feelings for. When asked if she loved her baby she said bitterly "Wha name so? Mi no know dah feeling deh."

There are countless Jamaican youngsters who ask the same question and give the same answer, often with a gun. Having never known love, they love no-one, including themselves, and value neither their lives nor anyone else's. Doghearts are grown, not born.

In his book, Life Without Father, David Popenoe found the relationship between family structure and crime to be so strong that controlling for family configurations erases the relationship between race and low income and crime ­ single parent white and black offspring have similar crime rates.

Sixty per cent of America's rapists, 72 per cent of adolescent murderers and 70 per cent of long-term prison inmates come from fatherless homes.

Most fatherless children grow up to be well-adjusted individuals, and only a small percentage become criminals.

But almost anything bad that can happen to children occurs with much greater frequency to those from single-parent families.

Nor does fatherlessness affect only children. Wherever large numbers of young, unattached males are concentrated in one place, the probability of social disorder greatly increases.

Two examples are the 19th century American west and the late 20th century inner-city ghetto.

As Daniel Moynihan observed, a society of unattached males "asks for and gets chaos".

Jamaica's absentee father problem is often attributed to slavery and illiteracy. Yet between 1950 and 2000, the out of wedlock birthrate increased from 70 per cent to 85 per cent.

At any rate, the problem is now, not then. And the facts are clear ­ if the majority of Jamaicans got continuous emotional and financial support from their biological father, we would not have the highest murder rate in the world.

A SOCIAL ISSUE

But that is like wishing the moon were made of green cheese.

In the first place, no one wants to admit fatherlessness is a problem. Columnist Valerie Dixon once lambasted the myth that children only need a mother.

But she is a very lone voice in the wilderness. Most people accuse me of racism or classism when I bring the subject up, and prefer to attribute our crime problem to poverty or unemployment or politics or a decline in religion ­ anything, in fact, other than the way we bring our children up.

Few Jamaicans seem to find anything wrong with our careless mating habits.

As such, most have become very attached to the belief that no matter what circumstances children are conceived in, or how they are brought up, they will grow up just fine.

And while this is true for the vast majority, we are learning the hard way the social havoc that a bitter love-starved minority of young men can wreak.

Because in the end, fatherlessness is not a moral issue, but a social one.

National choices are never right or wrong, they merely have consequences. Such as the highest murder rate in the world ­ and rising.