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What can be done to address the problem of urban gang violence and crime in Belize? That is what Herbert Gayle has been trying to find out. He is a gang violence expert and for the past four years he has been traveling to Belize spending time on the streets and in the company of youths at risk. Today he shared the knowledge he has gained with principals, counselors and police officers. He told us what he hopes to accomplish.

Herbert Gayle, Gang Violence Expert
“The gang violence in Belize has taken a sharp turn and when I say sharp, I mean if you look at the line you will see it actually jumping up like 30, 40, 50 degrees and almost geometrically, over say the last five, six years, and this is the same pattern throughout the entire Caribbean. So what is happening is there is a new generation of gangs because if you understand violence, violence is something that can actually be born in people. If you have a generation of violent people and there is a second generation of violent people, by the third generation according to theories and research, people will begin to be born with the genes to survive within a environment that is violent.

Knives to guns to grenades. In fact I am not alarmed at all because remember gangs are about dignity, about respect, about competition. In fact a gang has a simple definition; it is any group with three or more persons with some degree of permanence that compete violently, that makes a gang. What you find happening is that we’ve moved from knives, guns, grenades, and these gangs will ask which one is more graphic, who is the badder man now, and the question has to be asked: what is the next step from grenades. That is the operative question and that is why I have said to people that we have to begin focusing on prevention because no state in the region has the resources to cure violence.

This is a workshop for three days actually and the focus is on methodology. We are going to be spending the first day and a half, so the workshop actually has two sections. Section one is about understanding violence. So we’re looking at the entire rudiments of violence, how to deal with gangs and then the second half is about how to study gangs, how to collect your own information and therefore be able to monitor your progress over the next 10 or 20 years to get this thing down.”

Dr. Herbert Gayle who is a trained anthropologist of violence in the region has gained years of experiences by living with and studying youth gangs in Jamaica and Europe. The workshop which will run for two days at the Bliss is hosted by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with the Ministry of National Security.