Athaliah Reynolds, Staff Reporter

Declaring that Jamaican men are in trouble, Father's Inc chairman and university lecturer, Dr Herbert Gayle, says the country needs to readjust how males and females are socialised if it is to be saved from its downward drift.

Gayle, who is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, yesterday said Jamaican men were destroying themselves.

He argued that this was being done through crime and violence and men's selfish pursuits of women and sex at the expense of their own economic and social development.

Gayle was speaking to an audience of mostly men during the launch of Brothers United, a non-profit Christian organisation geared towards the mentoring and training of males in the inner city.

"Jamaica is the only country in the world where women own 41 per cent of the economy," he said. "If you look at any other country in the world, the average is 30 per cent. In Jamaica, women control the entire belly of the economy; men are at the extreme base and at the extreme top."

Critical

He said this was based, in some part, on the fact that women are socialised to manipulate their space in order to get what they want, while men are not socialised in this way.

The UWI lecturer said it was therefore critical that men be reprogrammed to learn that it is important to focus on investing in themselves and their own upliftment.

A study conducted by Gayle in 1999 to determine why some 120 individuals who were given offers to attend UWI did not accept the proposal, showed that males did not have the money to attend university.

Financial difficulties

He said the data, however, showed that women had four times the money than men had to finance their tertiary education.

Gayle revealed the study further showed that 17 young men had girlfriends attending the UWI, whom they were evidently supporting. These young men were among 34 who could not take up the offer to attend the university because of financial difficulties.

"So clear is the evidence that Jamaican men are a bunch of poppy shows," he said. "We have a situation here where, in fact, our young men are in trouble."

He added: "They are in trouble because we have brought them up badly. We have created a 'commodification' of sex in such a way that treats these young men as spenders."

athaliah.reynolds@gleanerjm.com