Professor Maureen Samms-Vaughan (Photo: Philp Lemonte)
WITH 80 per cent of Jamaicans ‘living in traumatized communities’, National Violence Prevention Commission Chair Professor Maureen Samms-Vaughan is drawing attention to home-grown risk factors that predispose children to aggression and criminality later. .
“Research on risk and protective factors tends to focus primarily on children and youth as research has clearly shown that although perpetrators and victims are predominantly in the 16 to 34 age group, risk factors for violent behavior are embedded earlier and this is the importance . of prevention science,” Professor Samms-Vaughan said in a webinar on Thursday providing an update on the work of the commission which was established in 2019.
Major risk factors identified by researchers over the years include disruptive family environments, abusive family members, poor housing, parental separation, exposure to violence, parenting, mental illness, and substance abuse. An analysis of community crime showed that 410 or almost 50 percent of communities in the country had no major crime. However, the commission chairman noted that while this was “huge” as he dismissed the impression that “every corner of the country” was riddled with crime, only 22 percent of the population lived in virtual peace.
“So more than two-thirds, we’re talking about almost 80 percent of our population living in traumatized communities. That’s significant,” Samms-Vaughan said.
According to an early 2000 study that looked at how violence plays out in the daily lives of children before they leave home for school in urban Jamaica, two out of three see and hear verbal abuse; one in three sees things thrown and punched; one in five sees adults kicking and hitting each other, threatening or using guns or knives. Children also have personal experience of violence before leaving home, with eight out of 10 receiving verbal aggression and eight out of 10 being hit. According to the same study, while walking in their communities, nine out of 10 see fighting; seven out of 10 see stoning, five out of 10 see a dead person; four in 10 see someone stabbed, three in 10 see someone shot, and one in 100 reported being shot.
Violence continues at school among their peers where three out of 10 are beaten; two in 10 are stoned and robbed and one in 10 is stabbed.
“Stabbing is a cultural problem, it starts in school, it starts with pencils and then when you get the geometry sets, so when we see a stabbing in results, it starts all the way,” Samms-Vaughan said.
Noting that Jamaica stands head and shoulders above its Caribbean counterparts for violent (physical/and emotional) discipline over the years, Professor Samms-Vaughan said insufficient attention has been paid to the psychological violence inflicted on young children. .
“In the social norms study, the kids there were actually more concerned about psychological violence than physical discipline. We had another small study where college students were asked about their experiences as young kids at school, and all they reported on the things they were told in school more than physical discipline, so this is another area that we need to grasp and grasp well, birth cohort studies are very important”, emphasized the chairperson of the commission.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness, speaking at the event, said the creation of the commission marked the government’s final move to deal with violence in the country.
“This will not be [done at] flipping a switch will take time. We’ve been dealing with this since Columbus set foot in Jamaica. We will overcome violence,” said the prime minister, noting the steps taken to eliminate corporal punishment here.
