The responses to last week’s article ‘Why not retire in Jamaica?’ were overwhelming across my social media pages. Over a thousand people commented under my Instagram post with nearly 100 per cent saying they were not prepared to retire in Jamaica until we “…fix crime and health care”.

Not surprisingly, crime and violence were the major deterrents for people. Many said Jamaica is “lovely and full of vibes”, but they did not want to be “robbed and killed” after they worked so hard all their lives. Perhaps this is why the Vision 2030, national development plan, left out the part about retiring?

But, is Jamaica really “the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business”? Based on the data over many years it appears we can’t live or raise families safely here. In 2005 the murder rate in Jamaica was 58 per 100,000 people, which made it the most homicidal nation in the world. There was a decline between 2010 and 2014, but in 2017 it reached a new peak of 60 killings per 100,000 placing it among the top five murderous societies in the world (Orlando Patterson 2019). By 2018 it was estimated that 169 people were murdered per 100,000 in Kingston.

This level of rampant violence over many years has wreaked havoc on the daily lives of us all and robbed our country of the urgent economic and social development we crave. Data shows that crime costs Jamaica 4.0 per cent of our gross domestic product (GDP) or $100 billion, using conservative estimates (Inter-American Development Bank 2014). This money would help fix our inadequate public hospitals.

Solving our crime problem will not happen next year, nor will it happen with unidimensional, partisan, monotonal, tone deaf, ensiled approaches intended to benefit a few. There are four problems to be tackled simultaneously:

(1) the socialisation of our children

(2) building trust between citizens and the police

(3) providing adequate resources to the police and the courts

(4) increasing globally competitive education and employment opportunities.

For me, the most critical is the socialisation of our children.

No one is born a murderer. Therefore, breaking the cycle of crime and violence in Jamaica must have as a part of the mix attending to the psychosocial and emotional well-being of our children and their daily experiences. Something went wrong and it went unchecked.

Signs of sociopathic, psychopathic, masochistic, and even misogynistic behaviours are exhibited at an early age. We need urgent readjustment with modern scientific approaches to help our children struggling with behavioural disorders so that they don’t grow up to strangle people and go to their mechanic work thinking that’s normal.

According to the 2019 UNICEF Jamaica Country Report, Jamaica ranks 4th in the world for homicide rates. In 2017, 150 children were victims of shootings and 46 were murdered in 2018. Seven out of 10 children under 15 are subjected to physical or psychological violence in their home (severe corporal punishment is five times higher among children from the poorest households). One out of every four Jamaican students, aged 13-17, have considered suicide. One in four adolescent girls aged 15-19 have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. Eight in 10 children ages 2-14 in Jamaica experience some form of physical or psychological violence. And, one out of every three male youth are not in employment, education, or training.

In August 2019 a St Thomas teen was sentenced to three years and seven months behind bars for severing the penis of a six-year-old boy. The convict was 16 years old at the time of the offence.

I recall that while serving as minister of youth and culture in 2012 there was the suicidal death of young Vanessa Wint at the Horizon Correctional Centre in 2012. Even though correctional facilities were not in my purview, we immediately visited the facility and listened for hours to the children locked up there. What I witnessed was how the impact of violence in their homes and communities affected their emotional well-being. Many of our children were suffering in silence, and would share with me their depression, their harmful lifestyle choices, and their thoughts of suicide. Personally, it was an emotionally devastating experience. But we set out to have an integrated approach that incorporated psycho-social, cultural and mentorship programmes to address our children living in State care.

As a result of the interventions between 2013-2015 the number of children in State care qualifying for tertiary education moved from two to 60. One young man scored over 11 distinctions gaining entrance to medical school. We coordinated with other ministries and agencies to implement key government policies. These integrated efforts included the separation of children from adult correctional facilities; teaching the Arts (dance and drama) to girls at the South Camp facility; placing more children with families; assisting more children with therapeutic care via a mobile SMILES counselling clinic; and building child-friendly spaces at police stations across the country.

Our priorities also extended to changing the mindset of those within the administration of State care to start treating every child as our own and not as a government statistic. I can recall meeting a young woman from the Maxfield Park Children’s Home who had the wish of being taken to school on some mornings. We sought to provide those new possibilities which helped immeasurably to build her self-esteem. She recalled how good she felt to be able to converse with someone on issues important to her.

By 2016, Jamaica moved up 52 places on the UNICEF Kids Rights Index to be ranked 51 out of 163 countries. However, we were still grappling with parents taking their children to police stations for “uncontrollable behaviour”. Subsequently, we presented the plans for the establishment of a child guidance mental health facility on the lands of Maxfield Park Children’s Home to facilitate care needed, instead of them being locked up. Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF) committed $60 million towards the project.

We went further and convinced the US Embassy to sponsor Jamaican-born, internationally acclaimed Dr Nadine Burke Harris to come and train our staff at the then Child Development Agency (CDA). Burke Harris, now surgeon general of California and founder and CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness in California, was revolutionising paediatric medicine and transforming the ways society responded to children exposed to significant adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress. Her studies concluded that early adversity and constant exposure to trauma harm the developing brains and bodies of children and, if not addressed, will adversely affect their health once they become adults, and have devastating results on our public health care system and society at large. In fact, post-traumatic toxic stress manifestations can likely result in children becoming violent adults.

It is now 2021, yet the children’s mental health facility at Maxfield Park has still not been built. What then is our priority? The carefully curated narrative we’ve built for ourselves to justify people who need mental health help is outdated. We should seek to have the urgent implementation of cognitive behaviour therapy into our school curriculum from early childhood to sixth form, including the training for guidance counsellors to spot and potentially treat these children with behaviour and learning disorders. Let us find the budget for more psychologists, community social workers, and health aides and place them where children are susceptible to higher violence-prone activities.

Erasing violence from our society must be our long-term, practical, usable everyday road map with all of us playing our part in getting Jamaica to be a peaceful and safe country. If we continue to fail in this area the consequences will remain catastrophic to Jamaica.

Lisa Hanna is Member of Parliament for St Ann South Eastern, People’s National Party spokesperson on foreign affairs and foreign trade, and a former Cabinet member.