Urban Poverty and Violence in Jamaica

THIS STUDY WAS carried out in late 1995 as a contribution to the design of the Jamaican Social Investment Fund. This Fund was concerned with emphasizing community-based interventions undertaken in partnership with NGOs, the private sector and communities themselves in order to achieve their primary goal of poverty reduction. The study utilizes a participatory urban appraisal methodology, with the specific objective of eliciting and identifying perceptions of four different aspects of violence, namely the causes; the interrelationship between violence and poverty; the impact of violence on employment, the economic and social infrastructure, and local institutions; and the perceived means by which government, communities, households and individuals could work to reduce violence.
Section I gives a post-Independence history of the escalating levels of violence, stressing the dominance of violence in the urban environment and the political nature of its origins within society. An outline of the methodology is given, including how the communities were selected. The analytical framework used is also outlined on the basis of the poverty–violence–institutions nexus.

Section II presents the main findings in two parts. The first explores the local perceptions of poverty, listing the general problems of poor communities, identifying similarities and differences in perceptions of violence among poor urban communities, and examining the gravity of these perceived problems in each community. The second focuses on the differing local perceptions of violence, first listing descriptions of violence, elaborating on the various kinds of violence such as political, drug-related, gang-related, economic, interpersonal and domestic, and examining the gravity of these different types of violence in each community.

Section III analyzes the relationship between assets and violence. First, it examines labour and violence, gender-based perceptions, the lack of mobility and the effects of violence upon local businesses. Then it looks at social capital and violence, first concentrating on social institutions with horizontal relationships, i.e. the systems developed in Jamaican society of inter-household trust, collaboration and mutual dependence as coping strategies with "horizontal" linkages. Family living arrangements, community financial support networks and community institutions are discussed. Social institutions with hierarchical structures are then examined, incorporating political power, church and schools, the police and other "strong men" in the communities. The question of whether violence erodes social capital is then explored with the authors, focusing on the spatial implications of violence on community association, the relationship between violence, infrastructure and the erosion of social capital, and the institutional implications that erosion of social capital holds.

Section IV seeks to elicit community perceptions of solutions by way of encouraging the vision of the "dream community". The researchers have separated the two broad categories that emerged into "ideals for the future" and "concrete solutions", with the latter being sub-divided into different sub-project categories for the upcoming Jamaican Social Investment Fund. Community recommendations are formulated into tables for building social capital and for project intervention. The study concludes by surmising the effects of violence on the low-income urban areas of Kingston and stresses that, if the Fund is to truly provide an entry point to the violence–poverty–institution nexus, it will have to go beyond the traditional roles of social investment funds by incorporating into its strategy ways of promoting the development of social capital by way of: the rehabilitation of "integrated community spaces"; conflict resolution programmes; drug abuse counselling; family life education; career guidance; and technical skills training. The traditional development of human capita