Thu | Oct 23, 2025

Fix focus on deadly women

CAPRI urges greater scrutiny of females facilitating organised crime

Published:Thursday | February 20, 2025 | 12:13 AMCorey Robinson/Senior Staff Reporter
Claudette Thompson, senior director of public prosecutions; with Senior Superintendent of Police Dennis Brooks and Dr Dalea Bean, head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus, during the launch
Rudolph Brown/Photographer
Claudette Thompson, senior director of public prosecutions; with Senior Superintendent of Police Dennis Brooks and Dr Dalea Bean, head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus, during the launch of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute report, ‘Hits and Misses: Women in Organised Violence: Challenging the Narrative and the Reality of the Jamaican Gangstress’ at the AC Hotel in St Andrew yesterday.

Policymakers need to pay more attention to the roles of women as facilitators of organised crime in Jamaica, and implement anti-gang measures targeted at females, a study by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI), launched on Tuesday, has recommended.

The research, dubbed Hits and Misses: Women in Organised Violence, is aimed at assessing the role of women in organised crime in Jamaica, making a distinction between traditional support roles and more direct roles in violent gangs.

It also aims to interrogate stakeholder perspectives of female criminal involvement, particularly those views held by the police, policymakers and the media.

In the end, it found that, last year, only 19 women were arrested for gang-related offences. This is less than four per cent of the total 488 arrests, CAPRI said. Additionally, women accounted for less than three per cent of violent crime arrests.

In 2021, the report continued, only two per cent of persons arrested for murder were women; and the numbers relating to shootings for females were equally low for the period, the institute found. Women featured predominantly, however, in human trafficking crimes and crimes surrounding violence against children.

However, while women are not pulling the trigger, CAPRI’s study revealed that “women’s participation in violent crime is generally limited to domestic or interpersonal contexts, including hiring contract killers to settle disputes and eliminate romantic rivals”.

They are also used to transport guns, drugs, and money, as they are presumed less likely to be searched by male officers.

The study also posits that female involvement in organised gangs is most often tied to their childhood and familial experiences, economic dependence on men, individual vulnerabilities, and a search for belonging.

GREATEST CHALLENGE

“Understanding how women operate and participate in organised crimes is key to understanding gangs, which remains the greatest challenge to Jamaica’s peace, citizens’ security, economic development, and our overall well-being as a country and a people,” offered Diana Thorbourn, director of research at CAPRI.

“Women’s roles in crimes are often less visible, underreported, or harder to detect. While the numbers may not show a significant rise in female participation in gang violence, there are structural and contextual factors and shifts that support the notion,” continued Thorboun, listing Jamaica’s low incarceration rate among the factors.

“Many criminals, males and females, are simply not in prison, not incarcerated, so incarceration data is simply not enough to tell us whether women are involved in violent crimes or not,” she explained, recommending that the government disseminate training material in the anti-gang, gender and security sectors, highlighting the active roles women play in gangs.

Other recommendations include deploying more female personnel in anti-gang operations to perform thorough searches and to recognise and handle gender-sensitive situations; and, fundamentally, include women in land regularisation and community development to promote economic empowerment, reduce dependence, and lower vulnerability to gang influence.

Meanwhile, Claudette Thompson, senior director of public prosecutions in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, explained the difficulties in bringing female criminal perpetrators to book.

“It is harder to prosecute the woman in these gang cases because it doesn’t enure to the benefit of the gang, nor does it enure to the benefit of the individual. The gang needs a front. The gang needs somebody who is acceptable ... they need that figure to rent a space, for example, and the landlord will be more open to this attractive-looking female.

“She is not just an gangstress, or a mumma. She is wife, she is pastor, she is seeing about legal affairs. She has concerns about her own children. So, for the female who is a violence producer, gangster, it doesn’t enure to her benefit to present as a gangster, leader or a don,” she said.

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com