EDITORIAL - Victimising the victims

Stephanie Breakenridge is in hiding. Or, as she described it to this newspaper, she's in protective custody. Further, in Jamaica, whose Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, Ms Breakenridge has been advised not to speak about a matter close to her heart and about which she has clear opinions.

This circumscription of Ms Breakenridge's freedom of expression is another, if indirect, example of Jamaica's chronic state of insecurity and how those with the means to exercise violence hold the rest of us hostage to their whim. Or, viewed from another perspective, it is a statement about a coarsened society in which the nihilists may not be far from clear ascendancy.

For those who have paid attention, Stephanie Breakenridge is the sister of Clive 'Lizard' Williams, the man for whose murder dancehall entertainer, Adidja Palmer, popularly known as Vybz Kartel, and three other men were last week convicted, but are yet to be sentenced.

Ms Breakenridge testified at the trial about how her brother and another man came to her home fearful that they had been marked for death for having lost guns kept in their care. In the aftermath of the trial, she spoke with great eloquence about her brother, who lost his way in finding new friends, and of her attempts - wrongly, she now believes - to use tough love to bring him back to the appropriate path.

Ms Breakenridge hasn't sought to paint an angel of her brother, even though she feels he was sucked in by the wrong types of friends and compromised by his own grasp for stardom. Her larger and more profound message is about Jamaica's at-risk young men - the tens of thousands who are jobless and underemployed and are potential recruits for purveyors of crime and other antisocial behaviour.

But for having spoken out, there are risks, based on police intelligence, to Ms Breakenridge's safety, and, that, we presume, of her immediate family. The victim has been transposed to culprit.

We do not know from whom specifically the threat against Ms Breakenridge has come, but we believe we understand the basis of its inspiration and the spirit thereof - of those of influence, who internalise the myths they fabricate, which are then embraced as reality by impressionable followers.

NUMB TO REALITY

The shame is that large swathes of our society identify with this coarsened perception of ourselves, which exacerbates Jamaica's crime epidemic and exalts the nihilists as heroes. It breeds, too, a callousness to crime and, too often, to its victims.

So victimhood is unlikely to be seen for itself. It is subject to rationalisations to determine why the victim is also a culprit, the cause of his or her own victimhood.

There is a Victim Support Unit in Jamaica in the justice ministry whose role, we expect, is to support people like Ms Breakenridge, or the key prosecution witness in the case who may be deemed to be in need of long-term protection. That's good.

We, however, believe that there is need for something more - of greater scope and breadth. Perhaps, Mark Golding, the justice minister, may think of a national campaign that transforms fleeting images, or sterile, amorphous statistics into real people, with real lives.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.