A recent study has found that Jamaican youths feel exploited by parents, the church and the police, prompting lead researcher Herbert Gayle to call for a complete overhaul of the support services for youths on the island.

But more than that, Gayle, an anthropologist, said it was essential that the society immediately re-examine the opportunity structures currently available to young people, and particularly young males, if the island’s development is to be assured.

“What we learned overall was that the support systems for youth in Jamaica are extremely poor. The youth felt they were used and abused by everybody and not getting any support,” Gayle told the Sunday Observer of the study entitled “Force Ripe”.

Funded by the World Bank and managed by the recently concluded Jamaica Social Policy Evaluation Project (JASPEV), the study was undertaken by Gayle as the principal investigator and his colleague from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Horace Levy.

The researchers looked at youths between 15 and 29 years old from two inner-city and one rural community, and had youngsters interview each other in what is called peer ethnography. The participants returned to Gayle and Levy, who in turn, interviewed them.

“In essence what we found is that parents in poor working-class situations depended on the youths rather than the other way around,” noted Gayle. “Quite often (as other studies such as the St Catherine study of 2004 have found) single mothers cannot help their children because they really don’t have the resources to do so, and the welfare system in Jamaica is really too undeveloped, too fragile to help these families.”

As for the church, Gayle said young people felt it had an interest in them only to the extent where they could provide offerings and lend a strong arm.

“A lot of young people had major problems with the church because for them the church was like everybody else. The youth felt that they were only after their offerings, and their souls,” he said. “They felt that when the church spoke about poor and needy they spoke of old people, not of the youth. The youth were seen as young and fit. So they can be invited to the church for their physical strength, their souls and their offerings.”

When it came to the police, the anthropologist said the youths interviewed held that they were befriended only to the extent where they could be used as ‘informers’.

“Some of the youths felt that when the police have a good relationship with them it is with the aim to hustle information, to turn them into informers, which is equivalent to them being harmed,” Gayle said.

But the youths’ concerns extended beyond their parents, the church and police to the politicians, dons and schools.

“When you moved on to the don, the don send them to mash a work (steal, drug peddle and sometimes to kill), but the don also sets them up and kills them. And when they mash a work, they are not treated as an equal partner,” the researcher said. “Politicians are equal to dons. The politicians use and abuse them the same way. So they pool politicians and the dons in the same category.”

Criminologist Professor Bernard Headley, like Gayle, said that the results of the study mean action is needed to allow young people to feel more a part of mainstream society. It is, he said, unacceptable that Jamaica’s youth should feel exploited and alienated from adults in the society, and especially from institutions such as the church.

“They feel isolated and that people are using them and while it may not necessarily be true, the fact that they feel this way means that it is serious enough for the adults in the society to deal with,” Headley told the Sunday Observer. “It is a matter of trust. It means that something is wrong between us and them. There has to be mutual trust.”

Headley said that he was particularly concerned about the distrust of the church among youths.

“Certainly, one of the things that really speaks to me is the matter of the church. They feel that they are exploited by the church. It means that the church community will have to really buckle down and address the youth,” he said. “Findings like these speak to a disconnect between the society and the youth, and it has to be addressed.”

Gayle agreed.

“The church needs to get involved. Some churches do a lot, but the churches need to become more involved in community work. They are inside the building too much,” the anthropologist said. “They need to go out and work with the youth. Youths should be able to come to church anyhow. The church needs to function as a social brother.”

Failure to do so, Headley said, could lead to an even further increase in the incidence of crime across the island.

“Those of us who do research on crime in the society are finding that a reason for criminality in young people is insufficient bonding between conventional, adult, mainstream society, and young folks. So we have to address how we strengthen the bonds that are frayed,” Headley said.

Children’s Advocate Mary Clarke said that there was little doubt that organisations with responsibility for representing the interests of children, such as her own office, could be strengthened.

However, in the interim, she said they were doing the best they could, given their mandate and the available resources.

“We have been doing advocacy, highlighting issues, having meetings one-to-one. reviewing services, trying to do research to inform decision-making. So we are trying to do proposals to access funding to do research,” she said. “We are right now doing some research of the child and the justice system, where we are doing a little survey of children who interface with the justice system. I believe a lot of times those who make decisions do not know how it is impacting the child.”

Gayle recommended a raft of measures to deal with the immediate and long-term needs of young people. Among them, he said, was a unit dedicated solely to youth development.

“I am recommending that they (the Government) have a fully functioning unit for youth development, which looks at how to draw the creative energies of the youth and make it more marketable,” he said. “They are at a stage in their lives where they need the most help, yet the youth at that level are finding that their parents and other adults around them need something from them.”

Beyond that, he said programmes geared at poverty alleviation must target entire families and not only certain groups within the society. It is also critical that aid be given to people on the basis of proven need and not gender. Too often, he said, men were denied help because of their gender.

“There needs to be a needs assessment. If it is a girl who needs help, help her. If it is a boy who needs help, help him. If the assessment says this group needs help, then help it. It shouldn’t matter if the group has breasts,” Gayle said.

Finally, the researcher said that people needed to recognise that children did not exist to serve as their “old age pension”.

“What we need to do is to address the opportunity structures. We need to provide opportunities for them, and change this philosophy that these children are our old age pension, and our property. The state needs to form a protective shelter,” he said.