“It takes a whole village to raise a child.” How high-sounding a proverb. How appropriate for a bygone age. How accurate concerning parenting that could once be found all over Africa. How ill-fitting a phrase in Jamaica today.

Among some of our childcare enthusiasts this ancient African saw seems to roll easily off the tongue but with insufficient thought of the changing times, the shifting patterns of human conduct, and the variety of people’s roots and culture. The ‘village’ from which they seek this kind assistance is now a rarity. The characteristics of today’s village in no way equate with those of early Africa. Now it is overstocked with child abusers, including abductors, rapists and murderers, and those who do not fit into this class are neighbours and friends stricken with silence, whether by fear or favour.

In Jamaica the official statistics tell the woeful tale: A total of 44,782 reports of child abuse were made to the Office of the Children’s Registry during the period 2007 – 2013. The figures for 2013 alone added up to 10,000 cases, half of them from sheer parental neglect. The village didn’t help much, because immediate neighbours fear reprisals for interference, teachers are cautious about imposing disciplinary action on their charges, not all preachers can be trusted, and generally there is now a thin line between discipline and abuse.

This village cannot raise a child. It takes a wholesome village to raise a child; the gentle arms of the family and the long arm of the State that must protect the neglected. Parents must live up to their responsibilities, and when they don’t the State must allow the whips to fall where they may.

Not only in Jamaica is the village involvement idea under stress. In 1995, four Texas security guards gave a whipping to a group of young burglars they caught. A hue and cry was raised by the parents, and the guards were arrested for aggravated kidnapping. In their defence the guards said they had acted in the belief that everyone in the community should help raise the children.

The early African villagers who coined the phrase enjoyed a different lifestyle. According to an article on the InCulture Parent website, the traditional African attitude to child-rearing is that work should be shared between different people so that both children and parents are involved in a supportive network of social connections. Parents would never be expected to have sole responsibility for their children in traditional African customs.

After colonisation and exposure to European family styles, as well as changing economic and social conditions, things were no longer the same. Africans were forced to leave ancestral villages in search of work, and this often resulted in the break-up of the traditional family system, with children being left alone while their mothers worked.

To cite the words of a student of African traditions: “Village life is tied together through cooperation and socialising. The survival of the village depends on the villagers sharing and helping each other. Everyone is related in some way, so the whole village is like a big family. People help each other with their work, and when they are not working they spend most of their time socialising: talking and joking and telling stories.

“… Neighbours also help look after each other’s children. Children often spend the night in the house of their friends or relatives. If children behave badly outside the home, any adult can discipline them and will report the misbehaviour to the parents.”

Past generations of Jamaicans can understand this. In their time, the village was respected, neighbours felt free to admonish, report or even discipline a wayward lad going in the wrong direction. At school, if the ‘board of education’ was judiciously applied to the ‘seat of learning’ the recipient would be anxious not to let his parents know, lest the rump be once more afflicted at home. Not so today. Many a teacher will hesitate to “raise a child” even by raising a voice of coercion, much more a rod of correction.

What has gone bad in the morning will be difficult to cure in the evening. The age when the Jamaican village could help raise a child is past. Traditional family life is sundered. Harmonious home surroundings are broken, and in many cases never existed. Idle hands are here in growing numbers and the devil is finding work and play for them. Self-esteem and self-reliance are diminishing factors; we are no longer dismayed by children having children. Meanwhile the impecunious State is slow to act. In this situation, we have to discount the call for the village to fix a problem created by years of poor governance, political tribalism, and corruption in places high and low. It must now be the business of the State to fix itself, revolutionise its thinking, and reorder its priorities.

To begin, the State must place education at the top of its agenda, with the prime objective of making better, more useful, disciplined, and productive citizens rather than the armies of young people, unskilled and looking for work, frustrated at every turn, and choosing abuse and criminality in order to survive.

The passing of the great Lee Kwan Yew should remind us that we can learn much from his country. The people of Singapore and their conditions are better than ours, only because of superior leadership. Our natural resources are a hundred-fold more than theirs. Their land is a fraction of ours in size and fertility. Their population is larger than ours and yet they have higher education, more social and economic prosperity, and both child abuse and juvenile delinquency are quickly dealt with.

Official Singapore policy: “Children are regarded as valued members of the family and the country’s greatest asset and future. As such, great importance is placed on their well-being, health, education and development regardless of their racial, religious and socio-economic background. Children deserve a childhood free of abuse and neglect and their basic physical, intellectual, emotional and social needs must be met. Children are vulnerable and unable to protect themselves in adversity. Therefore, they cannot go unprotected.

“Children need a safe and nurturing environment for optimum growth and development. As far as possible, children should stay with their families in a stable and conducive environment. When families become dysfunctional or unsafe for their members, intervention is needed to ensure that the children are put in a safe and secure place for their well-being.”

The Singapore State also plays the part of the modern village by helping to keep the children on the straight and narrow. In 1994, there was an international incident in which an American youngster was sentenced to a caning for vandalism and stealing. Singaporeans took that as a normal part of village involvement, but the then US President Bill Clinton described the punishment as extreme and he pressured the Singaporean Government to grant clemency from caning. Incidentally, two years later his wife Hillary published a book It takes a village…and other lessons children teach us. I don’t recall a mention of the Singapore incident in that publication.

Only this week we heard our Parliament being told that there will be longer prison terms for those found guilty of murdering pregnant girls. I thought life imprisonment was already on the books, but in any event the punishment is not enough. There must also be well-organised and properly financed preventive action, and this includes fixing the economic and social conditions of the village; improving the values and attitudes of the inhabitants;wiping out corruption and ensuring justice, quick and sure. It takes a wholesome village to raise a child.

Ken Jones is a veteran journalist, public relations consultant, and is the author of books on Marcus Garvey, Alexander Bustamante and other leading historic figures. Comments: kensjones2002@yahoo.com

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It takes a village…and other lessons children teach us written by Hillary Clinton.