Editorial | Rescuing Jamaica’s men

For more than a decade, Petersfield High School in Westmoreland has been among the best male teams at Jamaica’s febrile annual Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships, ‘Champs’. For instance, last year it placed 11th, having been 12th in 2021. In 2017, 2018, and 2019 it was seventh.

This year, Petersfield’s athletics coach, Machel Woolery, is not expecting his team to do as well at Champs, between March 28 and April 1. He has had a hard time recruiting athletes. Many boys, coach Woolery said, have an immediately more lucrative alternative to the hard discipline of track athletics and to staying in school. They are turning to lottery scamming, the confidence hustle in which mostly elderly Americans are swindled out of hundreds of millions of US dollars annually, and blamed by law enforcement for much of the island’s violent crime. Western Jamaica, where the parish of Westmoreland is located, is claimed to be the epicentre of the fraud.

Usually, the scam works by people obtaining sensitive information about vulnerable old people, and calling them to claim that they have won Jamaican sweepstakes. But to retrieve their winnings, the victims are told they need to send money to cover local taxes and other costs.

“Today, the scammers are the influential persons in many communities,” Mr Woolery recently told The Gleaner. “They are the ones driving the expensive cars, building the big houses, and having a lot of money. They are the ones our youngsters are seeing as their role models and idols.”

And it is a lifestyle against which, Mr Woolery suggests, he is having difficulty competing for boys to stay in school and join his athletics set-up.

METAPHOR FOR LARGER PROBLEM

This matter, of course, is not only about Petersfield High or track athletics. It is a metaphor for the larger problem of the crisis facing Jamaica’s boys and young men, and the country’s criminal violence, exemplified in its nearly 1,500 homicides annually, for a murder rate of over 53 per 100,000.

The information used by the scammers to identify potential victims, their so-called ‘lead sheets’, is considered valuable property, which those involved are willing to wage violence to protect and to keep the sources of these sheets proprietary.

The sweepstakes racket and the violence associated with it demand effective policing and prosecution for their containment. However, the phenomenon highlighted by coach Woolery demands a deeper and broader intervention, something aimed at saving Jamaica’s young men.

Jamaican girls, of course, are not immune from being recruited into scamming networks. Many are. They are also victims of Jamaica’s endemic violence, mostly from men in intimate-partner relationships.

But, with respect to criminal violence, young men are vastly disproportionately its perpetrators and victims.

For instance, males between 15 and 34 account for about half of the murder victims. When the age group of 35 to 44 is added, it is closer to 70 per cent.

Further, the school dropout does not only have negative consequences for Mr Woolery’s and Petersfield’s athletics programme. It manifests, too, in education outcomes, from high school to university. Indeed, even though the glass ceiling exists against women, and the glass escalator is available to chosen males, seven in 10 students at the island’s tertiary institutions are women.

Such figures raise questions of why males are on the periphery of normal Jamaica society, seemingly predisposed to antisocial behaviour and away from coach Woolery’s track team.

It is not clear that these statistics explain anything. But six years ago, the child development researcher Professor Maureen Samms-Vaughn reported that in Jamaica, boys, from infancy, were subject to far greater violent approaches to being disciplined – such as being pinched and slapped – than girls.

“The findings, which show that punishment starts as early as 18 months, suggest that there is a misunderstanding of the developmental differences between boys and girls,” she said.

POSSIBLE SUPPOSITION

One possible supposition, perhaps, is that boys, from early on, are being socialised into the idea of violence as a means of power, and as a tool to control the behaviour of others.

Around the same time that Professor Samms-Vaughan was revealing her findings in 2017, The University of the West Indies social anthropologist Herbert Gayle, in a series of articles in this newspaper, pointed to the social alienation and the absence of parent figures in the lives of over 2,000 young men he studied for a decade, between 2004 and 2014, who joined gangs.

More than 40 per cent were from homes with constant conflict, and six in 10 either had no father in the household or had significant problems with their father figures.

Especially notable was that more than three-quarters of the gang members had no mothers or a bad relationship with their mothers, or because of their lifestyles, such as involvement in prostitution. In 95 per cent of the cases both mother and father were missing.

These statistics might be telling us something about why Jamaican males behave as they do. But they are not sufficient.

There is an urgent need to update these analyses for information with which to frame interventions as part of a broad suite of programmes and policies, including law enforcement, aimed at saving/rescuing Jamaica’s young men.