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J
AMAICAHAS a real problem with social
violence, and this has affected the way we
are treated in the region and further abroad.
In Jamaica, almost everyone has experienced vio-
lence in some way, and most of us would like to
do something to help this country that we love so
much. In 2000, a team from Scotland Yard visited
our faculty (Social Sciences) at the UWI and
impressed upon us that “one of your very best
graduate students must come to England and do
one of the many programmes there in violence
studies and return to assist your country with its
terrible violence problem, and hopefully, by help-
ing yourself, it will help us, too, in England”.
The Scotland Yard team, baffled by
Jamaicans’ involvement in black-on-black vio-
lence in London, even promised assistance and
facilitated my training in England. I returned in
2007 to embark on this lonely journey to assist
Jamaica in reducing its social violence. This
series, ‘Light on Jamaican Violence’, was
created to help especially those who dare to do
something to act from a point of knowledge.
Those of us who study social violence focus
on gangs, murder-suicides, repeat killers, and
domestic violence. This requires us to be
trained in areas such as neurobiology, foren-
sics, masculinity, politics, and danger detec-
tion. The few of us in the world who are crazy
enough to combine these studies with anthro-
pology are called anthropologists of social vio-
lence. This means that we study violence from
up close; some of us even live with gangs.
We crazy anthropologists of social violence
must also love our country very much and have
a passion for young people – including the ones
who are violent, especially if they can be saved.
The core of my work across the Caribbean,
Central America, USA, and Europe has been
focused on gangs. Note though, that all forms
of social violence are connected. In this series,
I shall cover some very basic, but also techni-
cal, issues of violence and will do my best
to make it easy to digest. Knowledge is
better than gut feelings! We all know that
while some gut feelings are good, others are
an indicator that we need to use the toilet.
NOT RESTRICTED TO
CULTURE, RACE, CLASS
Violence occurs in a wide range of cul-
tures and in a variety of social situations.
It is not restricted to any single kind of
culture, class, or race. Half a million peo-
ple have been killed every year in the last
decade. Violence is a global issue. In the
Western world, violence has become most
visible in inner cities because of its fre-
quency and severity. Nonetheless, the mat-
ter of media coverage or public perception is
also an important factor.
The World Health Organization defines vio-
lence as the intentional use of physical force or
power, threatened or actual, against oneself,
another person, or against one group or commu-
nity, which either results in, or has a high likeli-
hood of resulting in, injury, death, psychological
harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.
Violence occurs in many different forms – from
threats at one extreme through to homicide at the
other. Any discussion of violence must take into
account that three parties are usually involved: the
performer, the victim, and the witness.
Definitions of violence are often of those who
witness it or who are victims of certain acts. Yet
for us to understand and explain violence, we
must also study the motives of those who per-
form it. In fact, we violence experts are trained to
focus on the performer or perpetrator rather than
the victim. The logic is that if we can under-
stand the motive of the performer, we are bet-
ter able to reduce the problem and help
reduce the number of likely victims.
GANGS, MURDERS,
REPEAT KILLERS
PUBLISHED: JANUARY 24, 2017