Editorial | Revisiting Michael Witter

Hopefully, many people have responded positively to Venisa Clarke’s invitation to become mentors in the justice ministry’s programme for children who have, or are at risk of, coming into conflict with the law.

However, while The Gleaner appreciates the value of this initiative, and endorses any project of this type, we believe that Jamaica’s situation demands a programme that is far more expansive, robust and aggressive than a few, or even a few hundred, volunteers doing good deeds. We want Ms Clarke’s programme on steroids.

Or, as we have framed it several times previously, the situation demands a mass mobilisation of the society, targeting schools and communities, in an unrelenting assault on social dysfunction and poor educational outcomes.

Our model for this mission, reinterpreted for the times and circumstances, is the JAMAL Movement of the 1970s, when thousands of people were motivated and mobilised to teach adult Jamaicans to read and write.

Ms Clarke is the director of the Child Diversion Branch of the justice ministry, whose job is to provide rehabilitative services to 12 to 17-years who find themselves in trouble with the law, or generally to divert them from that path before they come before the courts.

“The Child Diversion Branch is currently on a drive for mentors across the island,” Ms Clarke told the government’s Jamaica Information Service recently. “ We want mentors because they can provide a positive influence for our young people in the programme and we believe this will have a positive impact.”

So does this newspaper.

SOCIAL DYSFUNCTION

However, we believe that Jamaica’s crisis of social dysfunction, reflected in increasing violence in schools and among young people in communities, requires more than stand-alone initiatives, but an intervention akin to what the economist Michael Witter proposed a year ago. That is, attacking this crisis must be a primary focus of the government, for which it must find the necessary resources.

Jamaica’s problem of high levels of crime, especially homicides, is widely known, More than 1,000 people are murdered in the island each year. The perpetrators and victims of this violence are primarily young, up to the age of 30.

Increasingly, though, children are being caught in this cycle of crime and violence. For instance, in 2023, according to government data, 13 children were arrested for rape while a similar amount in the 15-17 age rate were arrested for murder and nine for shooting. Forty-six were held for rape.

These figures, however, are reflective of, and mask even, perhaps, a deeper relationship of Jamaican’s children with violence.

More recent data are not readily available publicly, but one study over a decade ago said that eight in 10 students reported witnessing violence at school, while three in 10 admitted to having themselves used violence. Most have seen violence in their communities.

These things take a psychological toll on children. Indeed, in 2019, even before COVID-19 became a full-blown pandemic, UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, reported that one in six Jamaican adolescents (16.4 per cent) – higher than the global average for the age cohort – suffered from a mental disorder. It wouldn’t be surprising if the disruptions caused by the pandemic, including causing Jamaican schools to defer classroom teaching for two years, exacerbated those problems.

What, however, is clear from the anecdotal evidence is behavioural problems in the island’s schools have worsened in the post-COVID-19 period.

Last May, for example, Angelica Dalrymple, then immediate past president of the Jamaica Association of Guidance Counsellors in Education, lamented the collapse of students’ behaviour in Jamaica’s schools.

HOPELESS CASES

“COVID has turned some of our children into hopeless cases, and these cases have gone into schools,” Ms Dalrymple said in an interview. “... The country has not put out any effort to help. I am not talking with any water in my mouth when I say that the psychosocial intervention from the ministry has not reached a quarter of those who need it.”

Children, she added, were “at the breaking point and seeing no hope” and many teachers had reached a place where “they can’t … be bothered”.

Proposed interventions were insufficient.

Around the same time, Leighton Johnson, then the president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, separately addressed the problem of disruptive behaviour in schools, in the face of a rash student-on-student violence, including two killings.

“...Violence, whether in schools or within our communities, poses a significant barrier to learning and to national development,” Mr Johnson said. “It instils fear, disrupts classrooms; it hinders the academic progress of our students and stagnates growth.”

He called for “additional guidance counsellors and social workers … to implement and undertake the home-based and community-based interventions” to address the problem.

There is no shortage of analysis and diagnosis of the problem faced by young people and students in Jamaica’s communities and schools. There is consensus, too, that it is a crisis and that intervention is necessary. What is lacking is what that intervention should look like, or scope of it. Or probably more to the point, how it is to be funded.

Which is where this newspaper finds congruence with Dr Witter, a former economics lecturer at The University of the West Indies, Mona, and his call for the government to escape “the tyranny of the immediate” to focus the long-term consequence of this dysfunction.

Were he the head of the government, Dr Witter wrote in response to Ms Dalrymple’s lament, “instinctively, I would immediately summon my Cabinet to estimate the cost of providing the trained counsellors, not pastors with informal training at best in counselling, to schools, and we would mandate the minister of finance to identify the available resources before the meeting ended”.

He conceded that this would mean taking “resources from somewhere else that the Cabinet would henceforth deem to be a lower priority than the mental health of our children at least for the foreseeable future”.

This idea, especially when allied to ensuring that all children who leave Jamaica’s schools can at least read and do sums, remains valid.