Anthropologist Set to Launch Book on Urban Violence in Belize

Anthropologist Doctor Herbert Gayle is releasing a book on urban violence in Belize. Gayle started his studies of Belize in 2008 and released the infamous Gayle Report in 2010. This book, released six years later, is aimed at providing a comprehensive look at where Belize has moved in the time-gap between report and book. Today, he told us that Belize has moved away from gut reactions, which is a positive step.

Dr. Herbert Gayle, Anthropologist of Social Violence, UWI Jamaica

“I think we’ve moved from that to begin to respect the fact that everything in the social realm is so complicated and complex that you actually need research. And that when you get research material you move to the next step which is strategic planning. What we’re trying to get all Caribbean people, especially Belizeans to do is to move away from the strategic planning to the implementation. You know we’re not so hot on the implementation. We have very nice ten year and twenty year plans but we’re not very good at getting people to answer the question – what are you going to do for me this year, because we’re not waiting on twenty years. We want to know what you’ll do this year and next year. So the implementation phase is where we are weakest. So that is the next step – after this book, after all of these things, is to get Belizean government and people, service providers, everybody on the street to say how do we implement the action, because the chatting thing has gone on for a long time.”

Herbert Gayle

Reporter

“And really it’s for everyone to do their part.”

Dr. Herbert Gayle

“Yes. Everybody must be involved, starting from the persons who are the actors – notice we don’t use the word perpetrator we use the word actor. In violence studies we’re not so much interested in the victims. A dead person cannot get up and make a change. We’re interested in the person who has done the killing, the actor. We’re interested in the witness who witnessed the killing, the stabbing and the murder for years and did nothing about it. We’re interested in the wider society who allow only a set of people to do it. That is called structural violence. If you see me killing my neighbor and because I don’t look like you or behave like you or have money like you, you allow it to happen, then I have to ask the question – what happens when one of you starts to do it? And so one of the things that we are concerned about is isolation and what we call social segregation, and we’re trying to say that this is a spaceship philosophy – like everyone on the spaceship – once they hear a sound, a crackle, everybody gets busy and goes to see what it is and that we need to abandon the lifeboat that says if Belize sinks we can sail off into the sunset because we have money or connections or networking or social capital as the term goes. So we’re trying to get everybody involved.”