If you are a young man caught up in gang activity in Jamaica you are 158 per cent more likely to be killed violently than any other member of the society.

That reality for Jamaica’s young men caught in the crime spiral was mentioned last Tuesday by the Director of Research at the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI), Dian Thorburn. She was speaking at the public launch of CAPRI’s latest study titled: “Hits and Misses: Women in Organised Violence’. Challenging the narrative and reality of the Jamaican gangstress’. The research was funded by the European Union.

Thorburn noted that 70 per cent of murders in Jamaica are linked to gangs. Twenty per cent are considered interpersonal, with a large portion of those indirectly linked to gangs. As such, those who are members of these criminal organisations are much more likely to become victims of gang violence.

Thorburn said defeating the gangs would go a far way in reducing violent crime in Jamaica.

“If you want to reduce violent crime, you must dismantle gangs, if you want to dismantle gangs you must address the structural conditions that allow gangs to operate with impunity,” she remarked.

Thorburn explained that since most of Jamaica’s violence is gang-related involving young men, the study aimed to highlight the role of women in these organisations. She shared that the popular idea of a rising female gangstress gave rise to the study which looked at how women function inside the gang networks. The CAPRI director said it was key to understanding gangs which remain “the greatest challenge to Jamaica’s peace, citizen security, economic development and our overall wellbeing as a country and as a people”.

“Without gangs, Jamaica’s murder rate would be below the global average [of six per 100,000] which is where we were in the 1960s,” said Thorburn. She stressed that Jamaica has one of the highest murder rates in the Latin America and Caribbean region but the lowest victimization rate. This means that the number of people who report that they have been the victim of a crime is lowest in Jamaica than anywhere else in the region.

“This contradiction is explained by the nature of our violence which is armed violence, primarily in the form of targeted shootings, carried out by gangs,” said Thorburn.

She explained that “The discrepancy between our victimization rate and our murder rate is because violence in Jamaica is so concentrated within small insular groups of young men killing each other in organised crime networks”.