Men at risk: how will we cope?
A little over two decades ago, the late outstanding Jamaican businessman and financial manager of National Commercial Bank (NCB) fame, Don Banks, soaked in despair, publicly asked the question: “What is happening to the Jamaican male? Is he becoming an endangered species?
Mr Banks was concerned with the number of young men clothed with pseudo-confident machismo, but threatened with irrelevance because of the rapid spread of self-empowerment of Jamaican women who are advancing at a much faster rate than men in a great many areas of endeavour pertinent to the urgency of national development.
Fast-forward to 2013, and we discover that Mr Banks’ concern for our young men of two decades ago is still shared by others throughout the society, even as efforts are made to grapple with the challenge of what is to be done about them; especially the rapidly increasing numbers defined as “at risk” and “unattached”.
‘Saving the Jamaican man’ is the title of a column published in The Gleaner of November 4 by guest columnist Collette JA Smith, in which she sounded the alarm in this way: “If you are born a male in Jamaica, there is a great likelihood that you will be abused (verbally, mentally, physically and emotionally), ridiculed (for being ‘soft’), used (by women, friends and family), relegated to a secondary or inferior place, and/or killed (by the security forces in your prime).”
The writer’s credentials as a motivational speaker and life coach, with the added experience of speaking with “hundreds of young boys and men in different settings… who are most at risk”, clearly qualify her to raise the alarm.
What is more, it is the alarming nature of the crisis that led educator, Professor the Honourable Errol Miller, to conclude, based on his ‘Theory of Place’, that the marginalisation of Jamaican males was a deliberate part of colonial policy to keep troublesome and threatening men in their subjugated place as a necessary condition for the maintenance of law and order and the preservation of colonial rule.
But, in my estimation, these concerns merely raise the question: What has been done convincingly, by both the private and public sectors, to carry out the necessary policy re-tooling in order to meet the challenges?
Furthermore, what real and appropriate strategies have been crafted to build up the capacity within the society to respond innovatively and sensitively to the survival needs of black young males of ‘ghetto-land’ against the background of the unpredictable shifts of change in a society still in doubt five decades after Independence?
And how will the future Jamaican society waiting to receive our dispossessed males as gangsters and violence-prone preys cope?
Undoubtedly, there is a great deal to put right urgently in the deficiencies of character that plague the Jamaican male population today. Far too many must face a life of poverty, being unattached and unemployed, with the freedom to do (and say) anything because they do not have an authority to answer to. The last time I inquired, more than one million Jamaicans now live on less than $250 per day.
“Yu have yute weh wake up every day and push him illegal gun in him waist an’ go a Half-Way-Tree like him a go a work, just like di policeman”, a “trying” young man confided in me recently. “Nutten nah gwaan fi tru; an’ when man hungry, man du tings.”
Unpleasant things are indeed happening, not least of which is the entrenchment of a new breed of hardened gun-boys intent on resisting their so-called historical emasculation, bordering on a cultural phenomenon.
According to the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), in the five-year period, 1996 to 2001, youths 17 years and older were responsible for some 629 murders committed in Jamaica. Expressed another way, approximately 85 per cent of all homicides in Jamaica in recent times are committed by young men from the 15-29 age group.
In all this retreat from sanity, the gun was used in 67 per cent of reported murders since the start of this year, 34 per cent of which were gang-related. Even more destructive, 86 reported murders for 2013 thus far took place in April of this year alone — 15 more over the same period last year.
What all of this brings to our penurious isle is a crippling backlash against growth and productivity. From studies conducted over a decade ago by UWI political sociologist Professor Anthony Harriott into the connection between crime and the criminal justice system, we learn that the total cost of crime in Jamaica amounted to $12.4 billion, or 3.7 per cent of the country’s GDP. Other studies conclude that the economy could boost its growth rate potential by some 5.4 per cent if the homicide rates were reduced to the levels of Costa Rica.
The unwillingness to apply oneself in any sustained manner at work, the almost total lack of a sense of process, the lack of respect for education, the refusal to submit oneself to the exercise of compassion and sense of caring, the littering of the countryside with offspring without the requisite support in the belief that their strength lies mainly in their trousers, and inflated notions of self and capacities, are just some of the afflictions of the species that have helped to deform the society.
But if we are to build the self-reliant, resourceful and productive civilised entity that Jamaica wishes to become, we shall have to take Mr Banks’ concern much more seriously. Saving male dignity through farming, membership of youth clubs and uniformed organisations will only make sense when we invest far greater knowledge and understanding in the ways of men in our society.
Our universities and tertiary institutions can begin by making men’s studies a critical part of their varied curriculum offerings designed to not only reverse the numerical outstripping of men by women in a number of disciplines and equalling them in a number of others; but also to unearth their vast entrepreneurial potential in a country known to have one of the largest positive cultural footprints in the world.
Is it possible that there is nothing gender-specific about efficiency, attention to detail, understanding of the contradictions of existence, loyalty, and the capacities for sustained application to a task at hand?
I have raised the question of how do we cope going forward as a society with the rapidly growing hordes of self-consciously male non-achievers who clutter the Jamaican landscape. How, say you, do we cope?