Gareth Manning, Sunday Gleaner Writer

NEW, DARING and brazen rules of engagement within the island's criminal gangs are costing the nation's children their lives.

Since 2003, a total of 398 children have been killed by violent means either due to gang warfare or personal attacks, including abductions, rape and murder. Another 441 have been injured by the gun.

While some cases have been solved during the last five years, too many remain unsolved, pointing to a failure of the state to apprehend child predators and murderers.

Of the 71 child-murder cases recorded last year, 41 remain unsolved. This year, of the total 63 cases to date, only 16 have been cleared up.

THE LATEST frontier for homicides involves the apparent targeting of the two most vulnerable groups in society - elderly women and children - according to Dr Herbert Gayle, lecturer in anthropology at the University of The West Indies, Mona.

"Formerly, the rules of feuding never included kids and it also never included women and the elderly," he tells The Sunday Gleaner.

Gayle, who has studied and published extensively on close to 20 inner-city gangs in Jamaica, says many have changed the dynamics of the game in an effort to trigger shock and show their dominance. He likens them to two rival football teams.

Degree of dominance

"Say two teams keep having a tick -tack, tick-tack, one-love, two-love, you beat me-I beat you, you have to make a move to ensure that I have some degree of dominance.

"The game gets boring in some inner-city communities. When the game gets boring, you kill a woman or you kill an old person, or you kill a child," he says. The rules are stretched or broken in an attempt to force opponents to retaliate. Many of the perpetrators are periphery gangs, smaller and willing to prove a point.

"Adolescent men done dead already, so [they don't matter]. Instead, women and children are brutally slain," Gayle points out.

His views are shared by chairperson of the Violence Prevention Alliance, Dr Elizabeth Ward. Although a number of the children seen in hospitals are victims of cross-fire shootings, she believes the gunmen have made a moral shift.

"There is this strong need for revenge and retribution and if you really want to hurt people, you usually go for their children," she argues.

"It's one of our codes that now seems able to be broken, because you never used to hurt old people and you never used to hurt children," she adds.

The code is being broken by younger criminals reared and poisoned to hate and inflict pain. Many are linked to political gangs which recruit and train them in the art of violence from an early age, Gayle says.

The art of war

"These kids are learning the art of factions, so even though they are all JLP or PNP, they will kill for promotion, they will kill for politics.

"They actually construct this picture of 'othering'. So, once two and three men can come together and say, 'You over there so is an 'other' ', they are going to attack you and kill you even if you belong to the same family," Gayle adds.

Many, he says, are the sons of single, teenage mothers, who often have to turn to dons for help.

"That means giving the big man access to your sons. These kids are getting direct training from very early, not just the regular factional training ... but they are learning the direct art of war," Gayle discloses.

But gory gang feuds have not been solely responsible for robbing the nation of some of its brightest youngsters.

Many have fallen prey to sexual predators, who kill their tiny preys once they have satisfied themselves. Several of those cases still remained unsolved.

The police have had no further leads, for example, in the cases of nine and eight-year-old, Shana-Kay Legister and Sheneka Shakes whose tiny molested bodies were found in the sugar-cane fields of Town Head, Westmoreland, though mountains of DNA were collected.

Predators frustrated

Although not his area of expertise, Gayle surmises that predators are also becoming frustrated.

According to him, many are men who have become boxed in by constant marginalisation. Out of frustration and in an effort to reassert their dominance, they prey on the vulnerable.

"There is a lot of change that has to come if these kids are going to stop getting killed. We are going to have to establish a policy which says 'in order to save these girls, we have to save these men,' " Gayle advises.

Psychiatrist Dr Earl Wright has a different viewpoint. He says extremes are developed because at a young age, many people, particularly boys, are exposed to high levels of stress.

"If we are being exposed to high levels of violence, if we cannot control our sex drive, then we are hard-wiring ourselves differently," Wright says.

"So, you have a whole society that wears their emotions on their sleeves. The emotions most of the time overcome logical thinking," explains Wright. The result, he says, is extreme cases of sexual violence.

gareth.manning@gleanerjm.com

Number of children (age 0 to 17)killed from 2003to Sept 24, 2008