Carrying water in a basket
Posted: 27/07/2010 - 09:43 AM
Author: Adele Ramos - adelescribe@gmail.com
The police are "the hostile face of the state"
Young males in urban Belize are facing a spiraling crisis, as violence in their homes and in the streets of their communities, deteriorating relations with police, abuse, sexual violence, gang-related attacks, and the out-of-control drug trade—added to pervasive hardships such as hunger, poor housing and lack of opportunities—leave a substantial amount of them so despondent that many contemplate taking their own lives.
This sense of hopelessness, the loss of value and respect for life, cannot be quantitatively framed; however, the results of an extensive violence research dubbed, “Male Social Participation and Violence in Urban Belize” give a clear picture of why so many thousands of our youth in this small population of 330,000 have been having an uphill battle trying to travel such a rough road in life.
According to the research findings, 91% of urban boys, mostly between the ages of 9 and 13, have been exposed to gun violence. Thirty percent (30%) of another group, mostly ages 16 to 18, have contemplated killing themselves.
The research findings were unveiled this morning, by a team led by Dr. Herbert Gayle, Anthropologist of Social Violence, the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica.
Nelma Mortis, local manager of the project, attached to the Ministry of Education, invited Gayle to undertake the study, after the fatal May 2008 grenade incident on Mayflower Street.
“One boy spoke about his father killing his mother and then proceeding to kill himself while he hid under the table and waited for the police to come,” said Nelma Mortis, local manager of the research team, in recounting their findings.
Only quarter of the children have good emotional support; no wonder our society is so violent, exclaimed Mortis. Domestic violence is the biggest of all of this violence, she observed.
A survey of secondary school students revealed that 54% had hurled a stone at a cop; 25% had been beaten by one.
“It is these kinds of data that tell us that we can go no further with this kind of relationship. We have to stop, genuflect for just a few seconds... and begin to move in the opposite direction of creating a unity between the police and young people,” said Gayle.
Dr. Gayle described the police as “the hostile face of the state” – the face that most young people encounter day in and day out: “There is a war going on between the youth and the police, and I’ll tell you literally that young men told me, when Operation Jaguar started, they said, ‘Dads, let me tell you straight up, long, long time me begging them to carry a full war, because we ready’.… We have no international rule that says our Chinese AK can’t bark and people need to understand the little thing called policing. It’s muy importante.”
Those officers who have their heart set on doing their jobs with honesty and integrity also have their jobs “cut out for them,” as Belizeans say. As the research team noted, there is also a problem with “untouchables” in society—people who law enforcement officers are forbidden to touch because of their political connections.
“If you hold particular people, the phone calls come within 15 minutes,” Gayle said, noting that people in the judiciary have said that they know when they can anticipate the phone calls demanding that they let certain suspects go.
“We have to begin to create a professional system and that is where the problem is,” he underscored.
Around 2007, Belize entered the top murder fields in the world. Why? “There has been a switch in the Caribbean, in the Caribbean vis-à-vis Central American corridor. We know that by the time we got to 2000, 2001, 2002, the Caribbean was so heavily policed in terms of checks for cocaine that the business people began to switch their business to the Central American corridor. Now Central American corridor ends here,” said Gayle.
From Mexico it goes to the US; from the US, it ends up in Europe, where the cocaine fetches five times the price.
“Seventy-five percent of every 5-pound [monetary] note tested had cocaine residue on it,” said Gayle. “That’s how heavily Europeans use cocaine.”
That cocaine that will end up in the US at $30 million will end up in London at $120 million. If they slice and mix and harden the product, the price goes as high as 7 times that cost.
Belizeans, said Gayle, have to step back from the moralist point of view: “I have worked with Nigerians that will tell you that oil kill the people. Now oil is not illegal... Whatever you distribute that goes through an area that has people who are extremely poor, you are going to have violence.”
Ninety-five percent of all cocaine goes just like regular packages, said Gayle. “The other 5% destroys little tiny communities where the people are not necessarily using it, but are actually competing in order to be able to sell a little bit of it. That’s our problem and that is where Belize sits – right on the whole corridor leading, coming down through the mountains....sliding along this corridor, ending up into the Big North and then heading off to Europe.
“You are right in that passage; the Caribbean has had one of the most powerful police groups called Kingfish. The Caribbean can no longer distribute cocaine the way they used to do, sliding it through the Mona Passage and having fun in the go-fast boats. These things are now being picked up much easier. Welcome to the road in which Belize sits.”
This is the international backdrop; local problems complicate matters. The problem of absentee fathers is also a tremendous one for Southside young men: Only about 1 in 3 Southside youth could find their father; 30% know their father and also know what he does for a living.
The study revealed that two-thirds of the fathers are missing in the lives of the children studied. This problem, compounded by large family sizes and poverty, makes life very hard and painful for a significant number of young people. In 14% of the homes, children are faced with extreme abuse; one in five was exposed to either extreme or moderate abuse.
One of the biggest problems that we found is the large family size, above 6 persons in the household, said Raymond Mossiah, statistician on the research team, adding that families are at a major risk of fracturing.
Youth in unstable families are likely to seek emotional support outside — including in the streets. “There is where we have one of the root causes of the problem,” Mossiah noted.
He also pointed to another problematic trend: “Mothers have aggressively replaced many of the biological fathers with step-fathers. And we have seen in cases where it is stepfather after stepfather after stepfather, and those are not necessarily good relationships either.”
This has been an ongoing problem and government has a lot to do to empower families, he urged.
“The poorest 20% of people do not have children in school unless somebody’s helping that child; so we slice the better 80% of the country and that produced a family size of 6.26. We found 39% below the poverty line that we drew based on both a philosophical and real frame,” Gayle detailed.
Violence-related problems are not just facing out-of-school youth; they haunt very many children enrolled in school as well. Schools are forced to operate as welfare centers: The school is carrying the load and teacher is carrying the burden, explained Mortis.
A mass of Belizean children are being left behind by an outdated and structurally flawed system. The team used the metaphor of carrying water in a basket.
The extremely high exclusion rate from school, said Mortis, has to be treated as a core contributing factor to the gang violence in Belize and other urban centers.
“The current situation is that Belize is far behind the rest of Caribbean and Latin America, which in 2007 had only 7.2% of its children ages 6 to 12 out of school, and that was the UNESCO report 2008. The problem becomes even more alarming at secondary level,” Mortis said.
The data reveal that 11,374 children are excluded from primary school. That’s a rate of 16.3%. At the secondary school level, 60% of youth are not in school that should be. The statistics for the tertiary level are “choking” – 4% quoted in 2008 UNESCO data.
“Belize might have one of the worst rates in the region,” said Mortis. “On what foundation will a government build a country if the tertiary enrollment is unmentionable? Where will Belize get the technical and social skills to solve its problem and chart its way forward in this global whirlpool? “
Belize has had an enormous amount of plans; but the problem is, there is a “disconnect” between formulation of the plans and their implementation, Gayle pointed out.
Close to 1% of Belize’s population—roughly 3,000 people—live in morass. Governances need to have arm and teeth; this cannot continue, said Dr. Gayle, focusing on what he described as a “fragile” Central Political Authority.
There are 4 blocks responsible for discipline, and the frame and operation for the country: Parliament, the Police Department, the Judiciary, and Civil Society. Gayle described the police as “the hostile face of the state” – that part of the state that young people see each day.
“I say this with tremendous love for the police, but they need prayers,” said Gayle, who said that within 15 minutes of talking with a group of youth on a block, he had a police officer jam an M-16 in his face. “It allowed me to experience what they experience, and so there was a bit of danger in the research, but that’s part of life.”
One core problem, said Gayle, is that there is no social distance between the police and criminal – the police recreate in the same places where the criminals do.
He also had a chance to interact with over 70 police in the study, and found that they too were facing dire financial stresses, which force them to hustle to make ends meet.
“They had no money; they were broke, they were taking the bus. They were driving vehicles in the nights without lights and without brakes,” Gayle recounted.
When he asked whether they hustle, they said, “Yeah.” He was not surprised.
Gayle furthermore noted that he has had the chance to visit 7 prisons, including ones in the US, Europe, St. Lucia, and Belize, and he has observed that the Kolbe Foundation runs the best prison he has seen in his life. “There has to be a question - the question is: Is Kolbe too good for Belize?”
Belize has what is described as “a celebrated prison,” Gayle noted. “If these kids [who are living in dog-sit-down and house made from crates] tell you that Kolbe is the best place they’ve ever been, should we change Kolbe into a rat’s nest or change the society?”
Almost three-fourths of boys had complained of life’s economic hardships. From among the 92 children interviewed, 58 boys and 34 girls mostly ages 9 to 13, major issues of sexual exposure were also unearthed.
Mortis noted that a fourth of the boys said they had been exposed to sex; only one by choice. “The others were either fondled by stepfather or a boy without consent,” she reported.
Melvin Hewlett, another member of the research team, reviewed information taken from PEER youth analysis. Their #1 concern, he said, is police-youth relations (88% of youth); second was drug use and supply; third was gang violence.
Seventy out of eighty describe relations with police as poor, horrible, bad, or non-existent at times, and some think that the police are corrupt and associated with criminals.
One of the striking secondary findings was on youth depression and suicide. According to Hewlett, 40% had knowledge of one who had a suicide. A total of 23 of 80 (almost 30%) had themselves contemplated killing themselves for various reasons – many due to the hardships in life. These are youth between the ages of 16 and 18.
Urging for this unveiling to mark a new era in Belize, Dr. Gayle said that Belize now needs to find ways to dovetail this research into the life-stream of Belize. The research is being financed mostly with private funds from donors. With such a major investment, he said, there needs to be public accountability.
Belize needs to begin to reflect on a spaceship philosophy, said Gayle: “If you hear a crackle, everybody concerned, because after the crackle comes the boom and we are saying, ‘Let this be the day when all of us have heard a crackle and we know there is hole in this thing... Yah bless you - let’s plug it!”
(Other members of the core research team were Jamuna Vasquez, Alindy (Marisol) Amaya, and Miguel Segura.)
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