Dawn Ritch, ContributorFew can doubt that the scale of violent crime in Jamaica has a specific cultural context.
Jamaica had 1,139 people murdered last year in a population of only two and a half million. In the first 30 days of this year alone, 71 people were killed by gunmen, or men in fake and genuine police gear. Still men, not a single female killer among them.
Fathers are generally absent from the rearing nests of most Jamaican children. The male of the Jamaican species learnt generations ago that having several baby mothers was the cheapest way to have children. Each of the mothers can generally be counted upon to look after her own brood.
This was always a fond hope, however, realised more often in the breach by granny in rural Jamaica. Today granny is more likely to be living in town, and she won't take the grandchild except as indentured labour to be put out on the streets to beg. Sometimes to steal, to whore, or to murder.
Jamaican men in the meantime still keep drinking and gambling out the house money because they can. Jamaican women manage on their own, because they are expected to. And sometimes their children are grateful to them in the end, but more often to their grannies.
Out of this dysfunctional milieu has come the god-like myth of the Jamaican boy-pickney. From the moment of birth he is worshipped by his single mother. To show her complete confidence in him, he is made to cross the road alone as soon as he can toddle.
By the sea he is made to wander off into it, because it is not considered necessary to watch over him, much less his sister. Since she is usually the first born anyway, he is left in her charge although only 18 months older. The responsibility of the Jamaican female begins early.
By the time the boy-pickney is eight years old, all permanent members of the household, invariably female, have decided that they ". . . can't manage him". Nobody anywhere it seems, can manage him.
Not even Dr. Peter Phillips who recently became Minister of National Security with a raft of crime-fighting plans.
Under Dr. Phillips' watch, the rate of murder in Jamaica is again going up, and he is unlikely to emerge a performer on that front. Not when S.S.P. Reneto Adams, head of the Crime Management Unit, can admit publicly before the Commission of Enquiry into the violence in West Kingston that some of the 25 dons he says are at the bottom of crime in Jamaica "... have control over particular (police) stations and (their) members".
Further slaughter
of Jamaicans
Formerly only the Police Commissioner was constantly whining on radio. Now even the most dreaded Reneto Adams is sounding defeated as well. This does not bode well for the future of crime-fighting in Jamaica. The public should be warned therefore, to expect the further collapse of the system and slaughter of Jamaicans.
In an article, called "The dark side of masculinity" on the subject of Mike Tyson's recent boxing press conference, Richard Woods wrote the following in The Sunday Times on January 27, 2002:-
"Fists and furniture flew. Journalists took cover. Tyson, grappling with Lewis on the floor, allegedly bit his leg leaving, according to Lewis' side, an open wound.
"Tyson, who has served a three-year sentence for rape and is facing further allegations of sexual assault, screamed at a journalist who suggested he should be put in a straitjacket: 'You bitch, you coward, you faggot.' Grabbing his genitals, he unleashed a stream of foul language. 'You're scared of a real man,' he said.
"Nothing makes a man more real, or more frightening, than combat. Boxing is one form, but war is when the primitive instincts of survival and revenge truly come to the fore. Ordinary men become capable of atrocity to an extent that has shocked even military historians such as Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed book Stalingrad.
"His latest research, investigating the fall of Berlin during the second world war, has uncovered the full scale of the depravity of the Russian troops as they advanced.
"'Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men are potential rapists,' he said last week, 'I had to come to the conclusion that, if there is a lack of army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three years of war, do become potential rapists.'"
"His research revealed that the Russians raped hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Germans; the troops even raped the Russian and Polish women prisoners they freed from German camps. In some towns every female, young and old, was violated.
Latent capacity for brutality
"But if this shows that there is a latent capacity for brutality in all men, most constrain it well in normal circumstances. In a population of more than 59m in the United Kingdom, there were about 850 murders last year and fewer than 8,000 reported rapes. Even if the number of actual rapes were 10 times higher, this would not make all men rapists.
"But potential rapists and killers? Possibly... ...'The simple explanation is', as one psychologist put it last week, 'testosterone poisoning.' Men have lots of the sex hormone, women only small amounts. Without the vital parts that Tyson grabbed last week - testes - male aggression and sex drive shrivel.
"...However as the American neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has said'. "It is not nature, or nurture, but the interaction of the two that counts." Neither has been kind to Tyson. He wasn't born smart and he was brought up on mean streets. . . The answer, he says, is to control, not deny, aggression: 'You have to learn to be friends with violence.'"
First Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear, next he's bitten a chunk out of Lewis' leg. All of which strongly suggests that if constraints are not put on males, they run amuck. In Jamaica, however, the god-like myth of the Jamaican boy-pickney means that no constraints whatsoever are placed upon him from birth. Pushing him out in traffic as a toddler, is therefore only a rite of passage intended to enhance his god-like masculinity. By six years old he's a princeling. By 20 dodging bullets from the lane across the road if he's still alive.
The women and children killed in Jamaica are only collateral damage in a war of men against themselves. If Reneto Adams sounds like he's given up, it is left to mothers in every socio-economic class to stop addicting their boy children to meaningless violence. Rein them in firmly at an early age.
