In Search of Boundaries
By Dr. Winford James
August 21, 2005
Posted: September 20, 2005
I cannot honestly say that I understand the kinds of violent crime taking place in Trinidad and (God help us!) Tobago today or the frequency with which they take place. Every day, it seems, there is a murder, and many of the murders are not simply single-shot or single-blow affairs but are executed with multiple strikes. There is a quality of ruthlessness, viciousness, and mindlessness to them that was absent in the relatively few murders that were committed in the days of my childhood and early adulthood. There now seems to be a rage that knows no boundaries, and I don't quite know where it is coming from. Which worries me a great deal.
The police could give me profiles of some of the perpetrators, but that would not be enough. They could tell me they are usually male and young, often Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian, either unemployed or underemployed, undereducated or irrelevantly educated, involved in drug pushing, caught up in highly strained love or sex affairs, etc., etc. But that would not explain to me the slaughter I read and hear about every day in Trinidad and Tobago. It does not seem to me that these characteristics are sufficient in themselves to cause grisly murder though they can certainly serve as excuses or bases for it.
Who can tell me what drives the perpetrators to act so rabidly? Politicians? No, they are to be distrusted because the business of holding on to power or seeking to win it forces them into either denial or opportunistic explanations. Priests, pundits, imams, and ministers? No, because they will only give faith-based, ultimate answers to the effect that the carnal human mind needs divine help to keep it within righteous boundaries according to a divine plan that allows violence and wretchedness of every kind before the end of the present world.
What about our sociologists, criminologists, and psychologists? Yes, there is hope here for their disciplines require them to investigate things like human nature, social conditions, different kinds of minds, and their interrelationships to understand why people act in the multitudinous ways they do, including why they act criminally. But I haven't read the literature, and the crime-focused studies that have been publicly reported have not shed much light on the state of affairs to give me the comfort of a good understanding.
We hear about correlations between violent crime and general factors like poverty, backgrounds underprivileged in educational and social opportunity, illicit drug trafficking, increased tourism, and political frustration. But the fact is that, drug trafficking apart, the vast majority of people who are poor, underprivileged, and politically frustrated do not commit the kinds of violent crime that assault us daily. And while tourism naturally offers conditions for desperate people to violently assault strangers, it cannot be rationally seen as a cause of such violence.
I am becoming more and more persuaded that violent crime proceeds fundamentally from an unhealthy attitude towards human life but that certain social conditions favour and promote that kind of attitude more easily than others. When a young man not only robs an aged grandmother but also rapes, tortures, and kills her, how can we blame poverty and lack of privilege? When a jealous man stabs his unfaithful lover multiple times and even severs limbs, how can we blame a deprived background? Such explanations are too facile for credibility.
What I suspect is closer to the truth is a weakening of the value of sanctity of life, as well as a fading away of community maintenance of values that support a healthy respect for human life. Not enough homes, I suspect, explicitly and constantly teach that violence is not an option in the negotiation of daily living, or that there are boundaries that should not be crossed if the community is to stay healthy. And what is passing now for community is really a set of individual homes in places where we live with little sense of communal sharing and responsibility.
When I was growing up, my village, and not simply my home, took responsibility for me out of a common sense that we all belonged there and each of us had to be our brother's keeper. Home, church, and village meetings combined to drum home values for the preservation of life. They taught me about boundaries that were sacrosanct, including the values that the old should be respected and human life should not be taken.
How are we going to stop the bloody murders if the sense of community is weakening as fast as it is?
|