GANGS, MURDERS, REPEAT KILLERS

JAMAICA HAS a real problem with social violence, and this has affected the way we are treated in the region and further abroad. In Jamaica, almost everyone has experienced violence in some way, and most of us would like to do something to help this country that we love so much. In 2000, a team from Scotland Yard visited our faculty (Social Sciences) at the UWI and impressed upon us that “one of your very best graduate students must come to England and do one of the many programmes there in violence studies and return to assist your country with its terrible violence problem, and hopefully, by helping yourself, it will help us, too, in England”.

The Scotland Yard team, baffled by Jamaicans’ involvement in black-on-black violence in London, even promised assistance and facilitated my training in England. I returned in 2007 to embark on this lonely journey to assist Jamaica in reducing its social violence. This series, ‘Light on Jamaican Violence’, was created to help especially those who dare to do something to act from a point of knowledge.

Those of us who study social violence focus on gangs, murder-suicides, repeat killers, and domestic violence. This requires us to be trained in areas such as neurobiology, forensics, masculinity, politics, and danger detection. The few of us in the world who are crazy enough to combine these studies with anthropology are called anthropologists of social violence. This means that we study violence from up close; some of us even live with gangs.

We crazy anthropologists of social violence must also love our country very much and have a passion for young people – including the ones who are violent, especially if they can be saved.

The core of my work across the Caribbean, Central America, USA, and Europe has been focused on gangs. Note though, that all forms of social violence are connected. In this series, I shall cover some very basic, but also technical, issues of violence and will do my best to make it easy to digest. Knowledge is better than gut feelings! We all know that while some gut feelings are good, others are an indicator that we need to use the toilet.

NOT RESTRICTED TO CULTURE, RACE, CLASS

Violence occurs in a wide range of cultures and in a variety of social situations. It is not restricted to any single kind of culture, class, or race. Half a million people have been killed every year in the last decade. Violence is a global issue. In the Western world, violence has become most visible in inner cities because of its frequency and severi- ty. Nonetheless, the matter of media coverage or public perception is also an important factor.

The World Health Organization defines violence as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against one group or community, which either results in, or has a high likelihood of resulting in, injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.

Violence occurs in many different forms – from threats at one extreme through to homicide at the other. Any discussion of violence must take into account that three parties are usually involved: the performer, the victim, and the witness.

Definitions of violence are often of those who witness it or who are victims of certain acts. Yet for us to understand and explain violence, we must also study the motives of those who perform it. In fact, we violence experts are trained to focus on the performer or perpetrator rather than the victim. The logic is that if we can understand the motive of the performer, we are better able to reduce the problem and help reduce the number of likely victims.