Martin Henry

Tomorrow, the day after lovers' day, a church-led National Men's Conference will open. There is a widespread feeling, and not without reason, that men need rescuing. When the list of what is wrong with men is run, the fact that they are not in church is usually on it.

The man who now heads the Government will attend and address the men's conference. The prime minister is not only endorsing, but has urged the organising committee to ensure effective mobilisation and follow-up. Another thing 'wrong' with men is that they dominate political, business and social power.

There is substantial confusion about what it means to be a man. And the problem is probably getting worse worldwide. Boys learn to be men by modelling men. But right at the start of man life in families there are too few men around in the lives of little boys as Professor Barry Chevannes will tell them when he speaks on Saturday, there are many serious family men in Jamaica taking care of their women and children as real men should. These guys get overlooked in the broad-brush criticism of the 'wutlissness' of men. I hope the National Men's Conference will celebrate them.

Dismal picture

Orlando Patterson in his now classic landmark PhD study, 'The Sociology of Slavery', paints a dismal picture of the emasculation of the male slave in Jamaica: "Slavery in Jamaica led to the breakdown of all forms of social sanctions relating to sexual behaviour, and with this, to the disintegration of the institution of marriage, both in its African and European forms."

After describing master/slave and slave/slave sexual behaviour and mating patterns, Patterson concludes that "the net result of all this was the complete demoralisation of the Negro male. Incapable of asserting his authority either as husband or father, his sexual difference in no way recognised in his work situation by the all powerful outgroup, the object of whatever affection he may possess, beaten abused, and often raped before his very eyes, and with his female partner often in closer link with the source of all power in the society, it is no wonder that the male slave eventually came to lose all pretensions to masculine pride and to develop the irresponsible parental and sexual attitudes that are to be found even today".

Jamaican men - and women - haven't been slaves for a while. And if the psychological and sociological lessons of slavery, which Patterson may have overdrawn here, are not reversible in freedom then our corner is dark indeed. Virtually nowhere else in the Caribbean is the case of the missing father as severe as it is in Jamaica, so clearly there are other factors beside the slave experience driving the quality of family life here.

Years ago, I came across the work of David Popenoe, who has devoted his scholarship as a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University to studying life without father and has put out a book by that title.

Popenoe describes the doubling of father absence in the US from 17 per cent in 1960 to 36 per cent in 1990 as a "calamity". He hasn't seen the standing Jamaican data! Social science research, Popenoe points out, shows that it is decidedly worse for a child to be deserted by a father than to lose a father through death.

Data provided by Popenoe are showing that 60 per cent of rapists in the US are from fatherless homes. So are 72 per cent of adolescent murderers and 70 per cent of long-term prison inmates.

Man a yaad is vitally necessary for the health of children and society. Man, the research is showing, confirming history and common sense and discombobulating the stupid gender war, is not just an additional parent useful in sharing the burdens of child rearing, but is a different kind of parent necessary to the psychological and social health of the child.

Weeded out

From primary school, Jamaican boys start to get weeded out of the education system. Where do the boys go if they are not at UWI and UTech? Thankfully, not all pon di corna and inna crime. Men predominate in the trades and in the most successful categories of small businesses, which, of course, now raises a gender balance outcry. And, contrary to pon di corna observation, the unemployment rate for men is considerably lower than for women particularly in the youth range of 15-24.

Anything which can be done to increase men's presence as head of households, in school, at work and in church is welcome. Christian revival and reformation has always had powerful positive effects on family life and social change. Sociological and political intervention have been far less successful.