Betty Ann Blaine, Contributor
"This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you" - John 15:12
I BELIEVE THAT the country is breathing a collective sigh of relief and perhaps hopefulness at the recent deployment of our security forces into the trouble spots of certain inner-city communities. Interestingly enough, I suspect that the citizens of those communities are also feeling a sense of calm and security.
I'll never forget the experience I had when I visited the residents of 100 Lane and Park Lane after the horrendous massacre that took place late last year.
As a group of us walked down the road to exit the community, several young women stopped us and begged us not to leave because, in their own words, "when you leave dem a go come back come kill we."
They would not allow us to leave until we gave them the assurance that we would come back.
I am also very pleased with the spirit of the deployment, and wish to congratulate our Minister of Security, Peter Phillips, on what is clearly a deliberate strategy to exercise respect and dignity for the citizens of the troubled communities. This is a good start.
SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY
More importantly, however, is the fact that this provides tremendous opportunities for the deployment of a range of social services encased in a spirit of love and brotherhood. With the security in place, the Government, the voluntary sector and the churches should seize the opportunity to move in with urgently-needed services.
Over the past few weeks, a team of four of us has been working with adolescent boys and young adult men in one of the most difficult parts of Rema. Our efforts are proving to be very fruitful, in fact, when I see what the handful of us has achieved with almost no financial resources, it tells me that if the powers that be, both public and private take this thing seriously, and are genuinely committed to creating change, then it will be achieved easier than they even realise.
But the key ingredient is love. It is the thing that is missing from the lives of all the young men in our inner-cities. As you sit and listen everyday to the individual stories of these young men, you begin to fully understand how their lives have evolved into criminality.
One of them recalled how painful and dehumanizing it was growing up as a little boy in Rema. His mother left him as a baby to visit England and never looked back, notwithstanding the fact that he had not one single family member or relative in the community. In other words, he was abandoned.
With angry yet sad eyes, he spoke of having to sleep as a small child under the house bottom, and sometimes on sidewalks. He remembered having to sit on the wall at nights and watch while the other children were sent to get their baths at the community standpipe, afterwards dinner, however meagre, and then to bed. He had neither food nor a bed in which to sleep.
He recalled on several occasions not eating for two days, and finally realising when he was a little older, that the only way to eat was to rob food from shops. That became his main activity.
What was interesting, he said, was that one night having robbed a shop, and running for his life with food in hand, he had to cook and share it with other members of the community.
"So often nobody gave me anything to eat" he said, "but here I was feeding the community from stolen goods".
My work in the inner-cities has made one main thing very clear to me. Jamaica does not have a problem of crime and violence. Jamaica has a problem of poverty and poor parenting, and the latter includes many, many, unwanted boys. What is frightening is that more and more of them are being born every day to teenage mothers and fathers.
For the life of me, somebody has to explain why we have abandoned the public family planning campaign. It seemed to me that just when the extremely effective "Two is Better Than Too Many" campaign was beginning to take root, was when it was discontinued, and that was that.
Now teenage pregnancy in our inner cities is again at epidemic proportions, and nobody is talking about it. How could this be, when this is precisely the root of the problem? You would be shocked to count the number of babies, small children and pregnant teenage girls who make up the population of one single street in any of these communities.
One has to simply look on the clothes lines in every yard to see the volume of baby clothes being washed every day. Of course, not to mention that every time you see a pregnant teenager, it is a stark reminder of how easily they could have been victims of HIV/AIDS, and in fact, those numbers are increasing every day.
The root causes of criminality in Jamaica is no mystery. A large percentage of the adolescent boys firing guns were born of teenage mothers, so we know that this is a very serious problem. Yet the response is in no way commensurate with the magnitude of the problem.
CRITICALLY-NEEDED PROGRAMMES
With the security forces in place, it seems to me that now is the time to move into these communities with a range of critically-needed programmes that would include, spiritual education, parenting, self-esteem and self-awareness building, community history and awareness, remedial education, and of course, job creation programmes and physical and infrastructural improvements.
It is also my view that the entire spectrum of civil society, non-governmental organisations, churches, etc., should unite and converge all their skills and resources into an unmitigated and sustained intervention that would support those organisations already on the ground, and further enrich and embellish the input of the state. My gut feeling tells me that the time is now.
Betty Ann Blaine is a historian, a member of the Victorious Movement of Jesus in Jamaica, and founder of Youth Opportunities Unlimited. E-mail: bab2609@hotmail.com
