STREET GANGS
Street Gangs, by Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP
In the wake of a sustained spate of violence, in which hardly a day seems to go by without the newspaper reporting yet another stabbing or shooting, the topic of street gangs isn’t far from everyone’s lips. As each story unfolds, ‘middle Britain’ is exposed to a level of criminal behaviour supposed to be the preserve of the USA.
Just last month a group of young men in their teens received long prison sentences for an attack on another innocent man. In this case, an ex-soldier, who had the misfortune to be cycling home one evening through a tunnel, was beaten to the ground and kicked until he lost consciousness. He later died, they stole only £5. A couple of years ago, a lawyer in north London coming home by tube was attacked and murdered just outside the tube stations- he was due to be married within days. They took only his Oyster card. A year ago, a young boy in Liverpool, returning home from a football game, was gunned down by another youngster on a BMX bike – the gunman didn’t even know the boy.
These are just three of the attacks that captured the imagination and the sympathy of the public. As in the case of the father who tried to stop a gang causing mayhem outside is house and who was then kicked to death, the reason why some cases like these create widespread concern is because the affect ‘law abiding innocents’.
Yet every week in towns and cities across the UK, there are many more such attacks, more often against members of other gangs, often drug related and always violent. In London there is a tendency to see these attacks as mostly confined to the Afro-Caribbean community, as so many of the victims and perpetrators come from that community. This assumption is a mistake, as there are many other ethnic groups involved in such gangs. This is just an example of the confusion about how widespread gangs are and why the crime figures seem to be at odds with the experience of most living in London and beyond.
A recent Metropolitan Police report estimated there were 171 gangs in London with a quarter involved in murders and half involved in serious assaults. Interestingly 80% of those accused of gun or knife crime were younger than 25 years old. However, there is some concern that the police do not know exactly how many gangs there are and they are more extensive than at first thought. John Pitts recently carried out a study of street gangs in parts of London and in Lambeth alone, he found there were some 40 gangs as opposed to the Police estimate of 27. The children growing up in this culture are becoming more and more used to serious violence as an everyday part of their lives. The Centre for Social Justice is looking at street gangs and recently interviewed some boys in a youth project. The majority claimed to know someone who possessed a gun and over half said they carried a knife for self defence. Knives and guns have, they indicated, become part of their culture.
Who then are the people who run with the gangs and why? Well, both in the USA and here the profile is similar. The gang member tend to be aged between 11/12 years old and 25 years old. They are predominantly male and come almost exclusively from broken homes. They will have failed at school, many leaving years before they were meant to and will have a long record of truancy and exclusion. Often they will have grown up in the shadow of the gang, with friends or family already in the gang. The gang offers, in a perverted sense, an alternative family from the family they never had. Brutal and disciplined, its code of belonging is both a strength and a reason for the high levels of violence. They learn early on that if someone isn’t part of the gang then they are an enemy and must be dealt with. The culture is also very misogynistic, with girls treated as goods and chattels, often abused.
Things aren’t as bad as in the USA, where the gang culture in cities like Lost Angeles and Boston is deeper and even more violent. In these cities, gang membership can run into the thousands, with territories staked out and inter-gang ‘warfare’ widespread. However, we shouldn’t be complacent. The growing number of gangs in the UK and the correspondingly higher levels of violence are indicators of a direction of travel. You only have to look back twenty years to see how far we have already come. Who reading this would have forecast the type and scale of the violence now on our streets? In this we have a great deal to learn from the USA. Cities like Boston have begun to deal successfully with the violence and in doing so have slashed their gang related murder rate. The show us that to deal with the streets gangs you need an integrated approach. Police, working with the voluntary agencies and social services, to draw the gang members out and place them back in education and drugs and alcohol rehabilitation.
But we don’t have to look at the USA to see how this can be done; here in London, a voluntary organisation called Kids Company is already bringing gang members off the streets and changing their lives. What they show us is that neither Social Workers nor Police working alone can do the job. What we need to do now is to rethink our whole strategy. Too many people are still in denial about the scale of the problem.
In the short term, we need to draw gang members back into the mainstream again. In the longer term we have to tackle the contributing causes; the high levels of family break up and lone parenting in the UK as well as drug and alcohol abuse. Stabilising family life is critical, for then we stand a chance of keeping the children in full time education long enough for them to garner knowledge and skills to keep them in the mainstream of society.
Once upon a time middle Britain was immune to the goings on of a few dysfunctional young men. Now they are coming to call. The choice is ours, act now or watch our cities go the way of the USA.
This article first appeared in Blueprint Summer 2008
