Hartley Neita, ContributorALMOST EVERY day, two weeks ago, there was a photograph on the front page of The Gleaner of a woman, her face shattered in by the agony of the pain of the death of children. Not normal death, but by the brutal murder, and sometimes rape by young men not young women who do not know the emotions of sympathy and love.
The newspapers and radio call-in programmes are filled with the anger of surviving relatives and friends, and just concerned citizens. Blame is attached to the Ministers of National Security, Finance, Community Development, and all the agencies which have been created over the years to help and protect us. Opposition spokesmen and women and their very articulate supporters demand that the Government and/or these individual ministers should resign, when the fact is that no Government of today or tomorrow can prevent this sort of crime from occurring. For, indeed, all of us in Government, in Opposition, in the NGOs, in community organisations, in the Church, and as citizens, did not see the danger signs being posted along the road of the progress we were constructing. Today, we have unwittingly inherited the ill-effects of policies and programmes once thought to be good and right for the country.
FRIGHTENING MURDERS
The spate of frightening murders of women and children seems senseless and with this in mind, I have identified a number of persons such as ministers of religion, psychiatrists and social workers, and sought their views on the problem. Today's views are from Rev. Marjorie Lewis, a minister of the United Church, a lecturer at the United Theological College of the West Indies at Mona, St. Andrew, and co-chairperson of the National Steering Committee on Values and Attitudes.
Her views are uninterrupted.
"A number of suggestions have been made by researchers. One has to do with the introduction of cocaine in the late 1970s, because if we look back, the cultural change in the pattern of killing came about at that time e.g. the wholesale slaughter of women and children at the Eventide Home.
"Before then, bad men did not kill old women and children. In fact, community workers were often told if something was going to happen, don't bother come out today. So the killing of women and children was a cultural taboo even among the criminals that somehow changed at that time.
"That is one element, because people say that when people just smoke ganja, they would sit and reason; it was really higher heights and deeper depths of philosophy and analysis, but the mood was calm and philosophical and it was about intellectual and theological engagement. With cocaine, however, people would sell their mother to get a fix and there was a brutality about how people were killed and an absence of humanity in some of those crimes.
CHANGING MIGRATION PATTERNS
"Another explanation has been the impact of structural adjustment and changing migration patterns. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the men who migrated first. The women were left behind with the children. But by the time we got to the 1970s, it was the women who were migrating to the United States of America.
"A lot of them were not legal not 'straight' and they would send home barrels with clothes, shoes and sometimes food. But that had a number of implications, because very often there were no grandmothers at home to take care of the young ones left behind. The new grandmothers were working and the communities did not operate in exactly the same way as before, because if you think back three generations, somebody would have 10 children but would still collect anybody in the community who needed assistance. So there were community systems that looked after children who were vulnerable and there are lots of families that can tell you of a grandmother or a mother who mothered other children outside of their biological children.
"Those systems started to break down. And of course some of the grandmothers were like 28 years of age, so they were not in the situation of taking care of that slack and the economic pressure meant that more of the women were migrating and in many cases, fathers were not there so you started to see a pattern of sibling households.
"We therefore now have a number of sibling-headed households, children in schools who are managing families and rearing their siblings. The migration not only led to sibling families but also a lack of protection of children so a number were abused and neglected. And if they were left in somebody's care, these persons could not contact the mother because she was not 'straight' and could not leave a telephone number.
"We also had the impact of the privatisation of the buses. This meant that you did not only have the absence of community mothers who would take in children because everybody was hustling, you not only had the migration of the biological mother, but you now had a society generally that was no longer caring. Claudette Crawford-Brown, a lecturer in social work at the University of the West Indies, recently reflected that there was a time when bus men took care of the children. You could put them on the bus and the crew would make sure they were looked after. Today, however, there is a whole generation of children who grew up hearing the phrase 'no schoolers'.
BRUTALITY AND NEGLECT
"So at every turn, there was brutality and neglect, and what the psychiatrists say is that if children are not given love and nurtured attention and if they are in an environment of violence for a protracted period, by the time they get to 18 their brains are hard-wired away from being able to feel empathy with other people, from being able to do basic social negotiations or to compromise. In addition, impulse control is not developed, the ability to plan and to set goals, the ability to manage their emotions and to understand those things.
"As a result, there are some late teenagers who will not feel anything. If you hurt them, they will feel it, but they will not necessarily feel remorse for killing somebody else.
"I think we have to find a way to see development in a holistic way and to value something other than money. That is a point that Carl Stone made, that having abandoned the plantation social and economic structure, we have a sort of vacuum of values and in the interim money has become the only value money and more money, by any means possible."
Rev. Lewis has much more to say, and I will return to them at another time and in another space. Next week, however, I will share the views expressed to me by psychologist, Dr. Peter Weller.
