http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070204/focus/focus2.html
Published: Sunday | February 4, 2007

Why does Jamaica have what is probably the highest murder rate in the world? Is it poverty? Is it education? Is it inequality? Is it politics? Is it over population?

According to World Bank figures Jamaica ranks 76th out of 187 countries in per capita income, meaning there are 111 poorer countries than us, nearly all less murderous. In 1962 the average Jamaican was far poorer and less schooled than today. Yet, the 2005 homicide rate was over 10 times that in 1962. So neither the poverty or education argument holds water.

The most accepted measure of income distribution is Gini coefficients. By this measure Jamaica is the 46th most equal of the 98 countries ranked. Other high crime countries like Brazil, Colombia and South Africa have far greater income inequality. Their Ginis are well above 50 - higher is worse - while ours is under 38. We are actually level with Japan and lower than Singapore and the U.S. Furthermore our Gini has actually declined since 1970. It's not inequality that's driving our murder explosion.

We've had political problems. But since 1962 this has been one of the world's most stable democracies. Our tribalism is nothing compared with places like Bangladesh, where bitter party rivalry recently triggered an army-backed state of emergency and an indefinite election postponement.

Bangladesh is also far more densely populated than Jamaica with a far higher fertility rate than our below world average 2.5 per woman. Yet, its murder rate is about one twentieth of ours.

As to the nonsensical race argument, mostly black countries like Barbados, Botswana and Ghana have far lower homicide levels. So if it's not poverty, education, inequality, politics, overpopulation or race, why does Jamaica have such a high murder rate?

Fatherless youths

No one knows for sure. But police tell me that the average criminal is a young man from a broken home with little education and no skills whose mother probably has little schooling herself and started having children very young. Most criminals probably don't even know who their fathers are - one notorious outlaw crew calls itself the 'Fatherless Gang'.

Is it unreasonable to conclude then that the real root of Jamaica's crime problem is uneducated teenage mothers and fatherless children?

The majority of Jamaicans clearly have no interest in the 'traditional' western married nuclear family lifestyle. Otherwise we would not have 85 per cent of babies born out of wedlock. And slavery legacy or not, our out of wedlock birth-rate has actually increased since independence. Yet there is a world of difference between a child born to a common law couple in a rural town raised by the proverbial village, and a child born to a teenage ghetto girl who never sees her impregnator again.

Sexual freedom

Few Jamaicans seem interested in modifying our mating patterns. Nearly everyone seems quite happy with our perhaps unique degree of sexual and reproductive freedom. The anti-homosexual lobby regularly thunders out Leviticus 20:13 - "If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a women, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death." But what about Leviticus 20:10 "And the man that commiteth adultery with another man's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death"? Apply such a law and this island would be uninhabited.

In his book Life Without Father, David Popenoe found the relationship between family structure and crime to be so strong that it erases the relationship between race, low income and crime. White, black, rich and poor two-parent offspring all have far lower incarceration rates than their single parent fatherless peers.

Single-parent 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 homes.

Nor does fatherlessness affect only children. Men with no family involvement are far more prone to violence than those in settled relationships. Any society with large concentrations of young, unattached males asks for and gets chaos - two prominent examples being the 19th century American west and the 21st century inner-city ghetto.

Which basically means that if the majority of fathers supported their offspring emotionally and financially, Jamaica would have a much lower murder rate. But that's like wishing the moon was made of green cheese.

But even if we take fatherlessness as a given fact, we can surely try to persuade females not to have children until they have enough education to be self-supporting and to give their offspring sensible life guidance. A poor, ignorant, immature 15 year-old mother is hardly likely to impart proper values and discipline to her present or future children. Any serious long term crime prevention programme must begin with reducing teenage pregnancy.

The first step must be to eliminate underage pregnancy. This could easily be done with three simple laws - mandatory reporting of every under 16 pregnancy, mandatory DNA testing of every suspected father, and mandatory sentencing of every guilty adult. God knows why these are not already in place.

For teenagers over the age of consent, counselling and education are keys. This should include increased health and family life education in schools and increased access to reproductive health information & services. True, such measures are commonly in place and have had some success in reducing the overall teenage pregnancy level.

But often these services are least present where they are most needed, the inner cities. Ghettos are the main breeding ground for criminals and ground zero for the proverbial vicious cycle of teenage mothers having girls who become teenage mothers and boys who become uneducated, unemployable potential gunmen. There is no way our crime problem can be solved until we stop this dysfunctional merry go round.

Among the proven measures are our highly effective Women's Centres, which Dr. Beverley Wright says have been deemed best practice not only in the Caribbean but across the Americas. Another very helpful initiative is the Bashy Bus which provides these services in a mobile form to underprivileged communities.

Help for teen mothers

Such programmes help teenage mothers to get back into the education stream and to raise their children in a sensible manner. They often prevent a single juvenile mistake from ruining a young person's entire life.

A girl who gets pregnant at 14 but who goes back to school and gets her high school diploma and goes on to tertiary education is one thing. A girl who gets pregnant at 14 and then goes on to have two more before she is 20 and never finishes high school is quite another. Any government that wants to cut crime in the long run must ensure that every pregnant teenager has access to a Woman's Centre.

The problem must also be tackled from other angles, one of which is reducing the child abuse that is also strongly linked to early pregnancy and criminal propensity. Paulette Elliott, a Principal Social Work Manager who worked in Britain for 13 years, argues that the state should be more proactive in protecting our children.

Whenever parents are not taking reasonable steps to prevent their children being abused by partners or relatives, government agencies - as they do in places like the UK - should have the power to remove the unfortunate young ones to places of safety and continued education. Otherwise you only perpetuate another vicious circle of abused children becoming abusive mothers and fathers.

None of the above is rocket science. They seem obvious common sense measures if this country truly wants to do something about our world leading murder rate. But do we really? Or do we like things as they are?