Even in the criminal underworld there is an unwritten code that 'badmen no supposed to kill pickney'. "A child-killer is a sick man, a man who cannot be trusted," an area leader from Wilton Gardens told Lifestyle earlier >this week. "When gunman Everald 'Run Joe' Carby was said to be the one who killed the kids in that shooting in Hannah Town a couple of years ago, he was ostracised, everybody just draw way from him 'cause dem know something was wrong wid him. The protectors of a community cannot be child-killers."
Claude Mills, Staff Reporter
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27. 7:30 p.m. The carefree sound of laughter and dancehall music fills the air as children and teenagers play at a birthday party on Central Avenue in Greenwich Town, Kingston. Nearby, other children buy ice cream cones from a shop just as a nondescript Toyota Corolla car crawls ominously up Central Avenue. Four men are seated in the car.
Suddenly, the innocence of the night is murdered by the sound of automatic gunfire from AK47s. The children scream in terror, adults grab their little ones and sprint for cover. Thirteen-year-old Shawna Palmer scrambles to protect a two-year-old close to her. As the car rolls to a stop, the firing continues and bullets chase the victims as they run helter-skelter in search of safety. When the gunfire dies down and the car roars off, Shawna does not get up. A bullet has shattered her skull. Her two-year-old nephew, Maleke Palmer, is shot twice. He is still battling for life in hospital.
There have been periods in the last four weeks when it seemed that no child was safe -- not even a seven-month-old baby cradled in his grandmother's arms (in the Hannah Town area of Kingston). Ten children have been murdered since the start of October -- 15 so far this year. In addition to Shawna and the seven-month-old infant, they include:
Shanike Malcolm, 15, and her three-year-old twin sisters Shavel and Shavanese, in their bed at 3:00 a.m., Rema
Romeo Lawrence, 12, in a barber shop chair on King Street in Kingston
Lateisha Green, 14, raped and killed in St. Elizabeth
WHY CHILDREN ARE BEING MURDERED
In the wake of this slaughter of children, the country has been besieged by questions such as who are these murderers and why are they turning on the children.
"We are at war," says Yvonne Sobers, head of Families Against State Terrorism (FAST), in answer to the question of why. "Kids get killed in wars. A soldier doesn't care who he is shooting...it is impersonal."
"We have a culture of violence, and in the last 30 years, it has been given fuel by the nature of our politics, guns and drugs. We can't throw our hands up in the air when this sort of thing happens...we must ask ourselves: Do we want the wars to end?"
Experts theorise that the Jamaican killer has evolved into a different sort of animal -- a new type of criminal.
"I am seeing a new pattern of behaviour emerging in the people that we treat in the clinics," said sociologist Dr. Claudette Crawford-Brown. "There are conflict-disordered children who are 14 or 15 years old, who have guns, and who kill very easily. In a study that we've done, we found that family factors are the key ingredients in creating a conflict-disordered child who may go on to become a criminal," said the University of the West Indies lecturer in social work.
Long-term exposure to violence is also a bona fide problem that has a range of psychological consequences. According to a study of 1,710 secondary school students in Kingston by Drs. Julie Meeks-Gardner and Powell in 1999, almost seven out of every 10 students in the study knew someone who had been killed, and the same number had also witnessed violent acts in their neighbourhoods. The researchers also noted that 67 per cent (or nearly seven out of 10) primary school students who participated had seen the body of a murdered person.
The study pointed to the well-known cycle of youngsters exposed to violence who often display anti-social behaviour and aggression themselves.
A CRIME OF POVERTY
"If it were a middle class child, there would be a different reaction, but this is seen as inner-city violence."
Most of the murdered children have one basic thing in common - they are poor and live in and around war-torn Corporate Area communities like Western Kingston, Hannah Town, Rema, and Greenwich Town. These areas share dismal demographics with high poverty rates, feuding political factions, out of control unemployment and an extremely high percentage of broken homes, say child welfare officials.
According to sociologists, there are serious socio-economic realities that feed the cycle of death and hopelessness in these communities:
Poverty: Data from last year put the incidence of poverty in Jamaica at 16.9 per cent of the population. While this represents a decline over the levels of 2000, children still account for more than half of the poor.
Violent crime: Since the start of this year there have been a staggering 592 murders committed in the Kingston Metropolitan Area (mainly in inner-city neighbourhoods), out of a total of 893 across the country.
Dr. Crawford-Brown suggested that the lack of public outrage at the recent child-killings may be a class-issue. "We have normalised it, our leaders of state and business have not come out strongly about it, and so a whole generation of children grows up thinking this sort of behaviour is normal. If it were a middle class child, there would be a different reaction, but this is seen as inner-city violence," she said.
CHILD KILLERS DO NOT HAVE HORNS, THEY ARE SANE PEOPLE
While Jamaicans search for an answer to the spate of child killings, labelling the perpetrators as sociopaths or psychopaths, and with less clinical words like monsters and 'sickos', psychologist Dr. Peter Weller said these murderers are sane human beings.
People are quick to draw these labels because they are afraid to deal with the possibility that there are sane human beings who are capable of such cold-blooded killings. "Many people want to believe that such a person has no redeeming qualities, and hence they choose to profile these killers as monsters because it is easier to understand a sickness which may have led someone stalking and killing a child than to imagine someone who doesn't care either way -- someone who would have seen a child, and not seen a child, and hence, showing no compassion."
He added: "These people are not all bad, that's why people (in their communities) protect them, and that's why they get to do it over and over again. They may be people in your family, who you work with, or take the bus with, or have a conversation with, and that's what scares people.
"Then again some may be Hannibal Lecter-like monsters, or sociopaths, or have personality disorders, but I believe that most of them are just regular gunmen who are even seen as warriors, who happen to have children numbered as some of their victims," Dr. Weller said.
"Often, the perpetrators (those who target children) have no value of self, and no feelings towards youth, it might not matter to them that they are killing children because of how miserable their lives have been."
Dr. Crawford-Brown, who is in the midst of conducting a local study on the issue, agreed. "We haven't analysed the issue enough, but I don't think these guys are sociopaths or psychopaths, but guys who are messed up in terms of their values. They are products of a societal pathology that produces individuals who are sick (in) that they don't understand the full consequences of what they are doing," she said. "No normal criminal will kill a child deliberately. It is not an easy thing killing a child."
She pointed to the possibility of anti-social personality disorder (APD) as one of the pathologies that may prompt a criminal to kill a child and stressed the need to establish a system to locate the 'fledgling psychopath' - the person most likely to become a serious and chronic anti-social adult.
According to a study done by American professor Cara E. Richards, 'The Loss of Innocents: Child Killers and their Victims' which gathered details from over 700 cases involving more than 1,000 victims and 990 perpetrators, many child killers are motivated by sexual urges, while others are sadists and crave power over helpless children and many kill from a random act of sudden 'rage'.
According to the study, many act out of religious belief, others act out of pure psychosis, many are regular people suffering from some form of depression or bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, added the researchers, these conditions go undiagnosed and undetected; oftentimes their condition(s) are recognised when it is too late for any intervention.
'I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT WE'VE REACHED A NEW LEVEL OF DEPRAVITY.' PUBLIC DEFENDER HOWARD HAMILTON
"The whole problem needs a psychological examination," said Public Defender Howard Hamilton. "I refuse to believe that gunmen are targeting kids...it cannot be done deliberately, I can't believe that we've reached a new level of depravity. The implications are horrendous.
"I'm constantly trying to figure out what makes these men tick. They have no ambition to live to see 50...there is a total lack of value of life, and a lack of self-worth," said Mr. Hamilton who two years ago, proposed that the Private Sector Organisation Jamaica (PSOJ) spearhead the establishment of a $2 billion initiative to rebuild inner-city communities in Kingston.
"We need a wholesale assault on unemployment. Once someone has a job, his whole perspective on life changes. He will have a stake, an interest to serve, and they will aspire to protect the little that they have. Right now, they have no job, no life, no dignity, but all they want is to establish a better quality of life, and an affirmation that they exist and do matter from civil society," Mr. Hamilton said.
In the meantime, several local agencies are offering professional counselling for troubled youth who have been touched by the violence in their communities. "We do what we can to help out. We provide counselling for the parents, and other children in the area, and in special cases, as in the 100 Lane Massacre, we took one of the kids in our care who was orphaned," Winston Bowen, director of the Children Services Division, said.
Still, said the counsellors, what these young people need is a caring and loving environment.
