“Hey gyal, yah informa?” bellowed a young man in a focus group towards a young woman he believed was spilling secrets.

This is why Uki Atkinson, research analyst at the National Council on Drug Abuse (NCDA), believes that Jamaica’s “informer culture” is active, resulting in youth being berated by their peers for speaking up on issues that may affect them.

“It’s still very much alive. While we were doing focus group discussions, I remember the young lady who was talking about some social media platforms that they could go on and view various materials, and the young man in the focus group said it just right out in there, and she immediately stopped talking. We had to address it,” Atkinson told the Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange last week.

“Now, this was not only in one focus group. It happened in multiple. So, where the children started to open up and talk about things that were supposed to be coded secrets among them, the whole thing about being an informer is still very alive among our youth population,” Atkinson stated further.

Saevion McFadden, vice-president of The University of the West Indies (UWI) Students Today, Alumni Tomorrow (STAT) Ambassadors — the vice chancellor’s student representatives on all five campuses — told the Sunday Observer that it is a hard culture to move away from.

“I think that this whole notion of informer culture comes from the feeling of camaraderie we long to have in our communities. I feel like it is hard to break away from due to its roots in slavery, whereby a slave would be looked down upon by other slaves during the plantocracy era, simply for sharing information with masters that might hinder blacks from rebelling or revolting against whites,” he reasoned.

“In this way, it has sort of become entrenched in our societies to support one another and to be shunned for doing something that, from another perspective, would be considered ethical.”

Last year, Director of Public Prosecutions Paula Llewellyn, KC, urged Jamaicans to “be an informer” once a case of child abuse is suspected.

Llewellyn was the guest speaker at a Rotary Club of Downtown Kingston meeting on June 2, 2021 and expressed that she was alarmed by the number of cases of child abuse, and urged the public to take a stand against the horrifying trend.

In 2020, Deputy Commissioner of Police Fitz Bailey said that the culture of “informa fi dead”, which persists in some Jamaican communities, had significantly restricted the police’s investigative capacity.

DCP Bailey, who was responding to questions from members of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC), said that although there is more room for improvement in the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s (JCF) intelligence system, the inability to charge some suspects is primarily due to a lack of evidence from witnesses.

McFadden thinks the culture has found itself further entrenched through agents of socialisation, such as social media and peer groups in schools, that continue to give young people the impression of supporting individuals, despite how unethical their motives might be.

“And, in shifting their perspectives, they start to perpetuate them to others to further ground the culture. I have realised that the only way to stop negative aspects of our culture is to make an attempt in socialising the younger children and the newer generations to come by making them more aware of positive moral and ethical practices so they may stay on the straight and narrow, as we would like to say,” he said.

“This can be done through edutainment programmes that instil positive morals and values from a very young age, so that they may be less likely to depart from it. I also think that, nowadays, a great way to mitigate an issue of this kind is to also target the agents of socialisation that are directly affected by it. For example, schools and the Internet.”

He added that by using effective communication and marketing strategies, positivity and ethicality can become more subconsciously engaging for our youth, so that they are resocialised and become more valued members in their region.

Paul Gardener, president of Shortwood Teachers’ College’s Writers’ Club, said the slang “informa” has been around for more than a decade.

“It is an expression to say that one talks or chat too much. This slang is still ongoing because people fear that they may get hurt or affected, and that is why many Jamaicans live by the phrase ‘see and blind, hear and deaf’. Also, in secondary institutions, it is the main reason why students are being bullied or threatened and so they are afraid to speak up,” Gardener told the Sunday Observer.

“Vybz Kartel and Jah Vinci produced a song titled ‘Murder informa’ and it has set a horrible trend for the youths. It has left a stain on our culture,” he went on.

Richard Troupe, acting director of the Ministry and Education’s Safety and Security in Schools Unit, also spoke out against the informer culture. In the school system, in particular, Troupe lamented that if children in schools come across something outlandish, they have a responsibility to report such.

“Even if we have metal detectors and CCTV surveillance systems, there is a possibility that a child could take a weapon to school. If our children see a child with such weapon, they have a duty, a responsibility, to report it. We don’t know if and when that weapon will turn on them, and a part of the campaign is also trying to ensure that our children understand that they too have a responsibility to play in being safe and secure,” he told the Sunday Observer.