The Centre for Social Justice - Knife and Gun crime

I live in London and I have three teenage children who travel on the tubes and the buses. Every day I have to make a choice to let them go out into this great city whilst being bombarded by photos and newsreel telling me that I must be mad to do so, writes Philippa Stroud, Executive Director of the Centre for Social Justice. Everywhere I go I talk with other parents who are deeply concerned about the nature of our society and why we are producing a generation that is so ill at ease with itself. Gordon Brown tells us that Britain is not broken and yet teenagers are arming themselves and killing one another in unprecedented numbers. 27 in London alone last year [2007] and half way through this year [June 2008] we are already on 22 - and that doesn't even touch on the number of non-fatal stabbings.

As a mother who listens to other parents, I know they’re worried and they hope their politicians and police will find solutions quickly. As Director of the Centre for Social Justice I work in the hope that we can mend this social breakdown. But I can see in their eyes that this could just be another set of promises from another set of politicians. In a sense they are right to feel like that, they have had too many promises - they want the work, not the words.

As part of the Centre for Social Justice, I know from our detailed investigations into the gang culture, alcohol and drug abuse and family breakdown, that to solve this will require the determination to understand the root causes, the vision to implement long term policies and the courage to see this through to the end.

People are longing for a government with such determination and courage.

So what is the truth about youth and gang crime in Britain today?

The majority of young people in this country are responsible community members: they make positive contributions, work hard and succeed in becoming fully participating citizens of the future. But for some, and alarmingly this is an increasing number, this is not the case. For just how many though is a constant source of debate. A conservative estimate puts the figure at about 20,000[1]young people but when you ask young people themselves, six percent[2] of 10-19 year olds say that they are involved in gang activity.

If what we don’t know concerns us then what we do know should concern us all the more and motivate us to action:

Muggings

Four in every 10 muggings in Britain are committed by children under 16 years old[3]

Knives

The most likely person to be carrying a knife is a boy aged between 14 and 19[4]
Child knife victims are up by 62 per cent in just 3 years[5]

Guns

Manchester police stated that young people who get involved with gun crime should not expect to live beyond 24[6]
In 2002 nearly half of all gang murders committed with firearms involved victims under the age of 18[7]

Punishment

Every year an estimated 70,000 school aged offenders enter the youth justice system[8]
An estimated 11% of all prisoners involved in serious assaults are children; this is despite accounting for just 3% of the general prison population[9]

The stats facing parents and young people in Britain today do not make easy reading, but when you talk to the young people themselves it makes even harder listening. My son has a friend who goes to a large comprehensive school in Lewisham. At the age of 15 he told me how a friend he plays basketball with was in hospital following a stabbing. He said how many of his friends carried knives now – not because they wanted to attack anybody but because they are frightened and they feel the streets are out of control. This is a good kid who is looking for answers, looking for politicians to take a lead, looking for safety to be restored to our streets.

How did we get to this place?

In order for us to be able to address the problem we have to understand where it has come from and how we got here. We cannot understand the problem simply by listening to celebrity sound bites, or by reading sensationalist news. Instead we must really listen to those who have the insight, expertise and experience to illuminate the drivers of this tragic development: a combination of academic experts who have tracked our social challenges, those who have lived in the communities that are now subject to gang warfare and those who are involved in gangs themselves.

Evidence taken by the Centre for Social Justice points to the emergence of gangs that are now semi-organised, violent, criminal and born out of acute deprivation. The gap between rich and poor is increasing and there are more people living in severe poverty today than a decade ago.[10]In our report, Breakthrough Britain, we identified the drivers of poverty as being family breakdown, failed education, addiction, debt and generational worklessness. When you get close to the gang culture on our streets the same drivers are at work. Put simply, knife and gun crime are the products of social breakdown.

Before I came into politics I started and ran a number of projects that cared for those in need – a nightshelter, two hostels, a rehabilitation house for addicts and a half-way house back into the community. The people that we cared for were typical of those who create the problems on our streets. They were the ones with the ASBOs, those who cause chaos in our town centres and the ones in A&E from self harm or drug overdose. They were some of the ones who were in the gangs that blight our inner city communities.

I can remember the first time that I ever spoke at the Conservative Party Conference. I was still running a project in Birmingham. I was speaking in the debate “Party of the Vulnerable”. Before leaving for conference I sat down with each resident and asked them what they would like to say. I asked them:

“If there could have been one change that would have meant that you would not have needed a place like this, what would it have been?”

Their responses speak for many of those involved in gangs and who are picking up weapons across the UK:

“It all began when my father walked out”,

“My life of being abused began when a step father walked in”

“I don’t know who my father is – my mother says that it would have been one of 6 men but she can only remember the names of 3 of them”.

We ask the question why crime and why anti social behaviour? I suggest that much of the answer lies in those responses.

Society will always have a criminal element – those for whom it doesn’t matter what you do, they will decide to be aggressive and violent. But the level that we have now and that is spilling over into every community and every school is being driven by something else. If you stop for long enough and actually listen to those who are kicking the cans, joining the gangs and shooting up they will speak to you of broken families, of childhood abuse and of a longing to belong.

Family breakdown

more than half the babies born to British mothers this year will have been born out of marriage
Nearly one in 2 cohabiting parents split up before their child’s 5^th birthday, compared to 1 in 12 married parents
¾ of family breakdown affecting young children now involves unmarried parents
If you have experienced family breakdown you are 75% more likely to fail at school, 70% more likely to be a drug addict and 50% more likely to have alcohol problems

For decades, governments have languished under the belief that there is nothing that can be done about social trends – and even worse that it would be wrong to try and do anything anyway. The best that one could do is to stand on the side line and comment on the changing patterns or manage the breakdown in a way that minimised harm.

Meanwhile a generation has emerged that, according to Unicef, is the unhappiest of all nations surveyed. Britain’s young people are the unhappiest in the West. Not only do they drink the most, smoke more and have more sex than their peers, they rate their health as the poorest, dislike school more and are among the least satisfied with life. Small surprise that social breakdown in Britain is virtually unparalleled:

70% of young offenders come from lone-parent families
60% of the prison population come from broken homes
One-third of prisoners and more than half of young offenders have been through the care system (even though only 0.6% of children are in care at any one point in time)

The UK has the highest teenage birth rate in Europe
30,000 children leave school each year with no GCSEs[11]
73% of young offenders describe their educational attainment as nil
Approximately 1.5 million children in the UK are affected by parental alcohol problems, and 250-350 000 are living with parents who are mis-using drugs

We ask why our children are failing at school and we pump more money into the education system that is failing them.

We ask why our children are joining gangs and we incentivise lone parenthood through the benefits system.

We ask why our children are arming themselves and we toughen our enforcement response.

Yet a young boy living with his single mum having never experienced a positive male role model learns his masculinity from the local gang leader. The child whose parents are drug addicted is focusing on where her next meal is coming from, not completing her homework. And the teenager growing up in the gang-infested inner city only feels safe enough to walk to the end of his street if he has a knife. Our Government’s response is not addressing the drivers, it is aggravating them.

Reversal is possible

At the Centre for Social Justice we are utterly convinced that reversal of social breakdown is possible. We are convinced that our levels of family breakdown can be reversed, our educational standards improved, that we do not have to accept that addicts can only be kept safe – they can be rehabilitated - and we know that having a job is the best protection against a bullet.

It is not rocket science to reverse the breakdown in our communities but it does require political will and courage.

Some argue that a harder and harder crack down is required and that the police need more and more powers to lock a greater number of young people up. For example the Evening Standard’s Beat Knife Crime Charter recommends:

More targeted high-profile searches backed up by more police with scanners on the streets, on public transport and inside and outside schools, with targeted patrols on routes to and from schools
Train children in “peer-to-peer mentoring” and use citizenship and personal, social and health education to teach the simple message: respect cannot be won at the point of a knife
Prosecute everybody found with a knife or using it to the full extent of the law: no more police cautions and no more second chances.
Use the toughest possible sentences on knife criminals: end the slap on the wrist culture which lets offenders walk free
Make prison work with compulsory therapy for young prisoners in which they come face-to-face with the consequences of their crimes by meeting victims and the doctors who treated them

The problem with these solutions is that they are short term. You cannot just “arrest” yourself out of the problem. We can go on building prisons and psychiatric wings but at some point we have to intervene in the journey that takes people to the prison gates.

At the Centre for Social Justice we have had our Youth and Gangs Working Group traveling worldwide to find effective intervention models. What I want to propose is a combination of my own experience of caring for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the work of academic experts who have tracked our social challenges, of those who have lived in the communities that are now subject to gang warfare and those who are involved in gangs themselves.

The Response

The most critical need in the response to youth and gang crime is leadership. Who will take responsibility for bringing down the escalating number of gang murders? When you ask this question you don’t see many stepping up to the plate. If no-one will put their name to the task then the inertia that we are currently facing will remain. For action to be taken, someone has to step forward and say, “This one is mine. My career rises or falls on it, and I am prepared to do the long term work to achieve it.” I hear many politicians trying to set themselves manageable and measurable tasks that have manageable and measurable outcomes, but I don’t hear many politicians saying, “This is the challenge of today so, irrespective of its enormity, this is the challenge that I will be responsible for”. If we are to be the party of government we have to be the party that accepts leadership for the real tasks and leads.

So what would that leadership look like? There needs to be a two-fold response to the challenge coming from our streets. There is a serious law and order challenge but there is also a serious social challenge.

Law and Order Challenge

At their most intense gang membership consists of 1-3% of the population of our most disadvantaged communities. With some serious work under some determined leadership it would not be difficult to know where the gang activity is coming from. Just because there is a murder on Oxford Street does not mean that we have a serious gang problem in the West End. The basic premise is that you cannot tackle what you do not know or understand. We have become a nation that collects and gathers statistics but what are we doing with what we collect and what is it telling us?

The first piece of work that is required is some basic raw intelligence. What is driving the gang activity and what is fuelling the fights and the youth violence on our streets? This would map gang activity, youth stabbings and youth crime.

Having done the work we can then deploy police activity accordingly. The message from the police needs to be firm – we are here, and we know about your turf warfare, we know what is driving it and we know who is causing it and we are not moving until it stops. Every legal tool at the disposal of the police should be used to restore law and order.

The goal of this targeted strategy is for a very real and clear message to be sent, that the streets are being reclaimed for law abiding purposes and that illegal behaviour will not be tolerated.

Social Challenge

However if this were the only tool used we would only see a temporary down turn in gang related deaths. What is needed working in conjunction with this reclaiming of the streets is intense Voluntary Sector activity. Disadvantage and poverty is the seedbed of youth and gang crime. If we are serious about tackling these dynamics we have to be serious about providing long term exit strategies to those who believe they have no future.

A friend of mine is a teacher of 7 year olds in a London primary school. Each member of her class already knows which gang they are headed for. Why? Because their elder brothers and sisters are already in them and these are their role models. As the police restore right boundaries, the voluntary sector needs to be mobilised to provide all the exit strategies required for these young people. Where education has failed to provide a sense of hope and vision there exists organisations such as Tomorrows People or Motorvations who can harness young talent that has been squandered.

At the CSJ Awards ceremony in July 2008 we invited a young girl to perform a piece she had written about the murder of her brother who was a gang member. There was not a single person listening who was unmoved by her performance. This girl with obvious talent had gone through the British education system and had concluded that she had nothing to contribute. Organisations like XLP who work with gang members, and Tomorrows People who support those furthest from the labour market with mentoring for work, are committed to “Making Life Work”.

Gang activity and crime are also formed in the crucible of broken families and addiction. This is not just a British problem. I used to work in Hong Kong with ex-triad members. These were seriously tough Chinese gang members who had been paid for their criminal activity in drugs and had become addicts – useless now to the triad gangs they came from. I worked with about 300 of them and cannot recall ever meeting one who had been raised in a two-parent family. The most effective organisation in Hong Kong was based in the Walled City (where most of the illegal activity was stemming from) and whilst providing a drug rehabilitation programme for the addicts acted more as a new community and by extension a new family for these highly damaged people. It was this new family that they craved. Every part of their lives needed rebuilding.

This story is repeated the world over and mirrors the needs of young gang members on the streets of our UK cities. What we so often offer in this country is a three month rehab or a weekly meeting on a Monday at 10am. If any of us had seen half of what these kids had experienced we would need an awful lot more. There are organisations in the UK that have understood this. From Camila Batmanghelidj’s work at Kids Company that provides a sanctuary and never turns a young person away, to Save the Family in Flintshire that provides re-parenting and support to whole families residentially, it is the Voluntary Sector that is turning lives around.

So why was leadership our starting point? Because we need to harness into one clear response:

The ground work to find out what is driving this challenge to our streets
A clear message through targeted police action that things have gone far enough and that we are now reclaiming our streets
A developed exit, reversal and prevention strategy pioneered by our Voluntary Sector, bringing together the best army of social entrepreneurs to be in the right place at the right time for the sake of the next generation.

Without the Voluntary Sector working on the ground, personally knowing the gang members and providing effective life changing exit strategies for those who want out, none of this can happen. Without the police being able to demonstrate utter determination and commitment to the fundamental need for a prevention and intervention strategy as well as suppression, none of this could happen.

If this teaches us anything it is that it requires everyone to work together. We are thrashing around looking for a strategy when actually we should be providing leadership where we are prepared to put our reputation on the line and say, “I will be accountable for delivering this”. What the parents of my son’s friends want is this leadership. They know it is not as simple as locking everyone up who carries a knife. They know all young people need a hope and a future and that many do not have that, and they know that long-term success lies in tackling the roots of social breakdown. We know this too. The challenge now for us is to actually implement the strategies contained in our policy documents. To take them down off the shelf and turn them into a reality that can transform lives and cities. That is the privilege of government and that is why we came into politics.

[1] T.Bennett and K.Holloway, “Gang membership, Drugs and Crime in the UK,” British Journal of Criminology 44, no.3 (2004):pp.312-313

[2] C.Sharp, J.Aldridge and J.Medina, Delinquent youth groups and offending behaviour: findings from the 2004 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (Home Office, 2006)

[3] Sergeant, H., “Gangs, alas, are offering what boys need”, The Times 19^th August 2007

[4] Ibid.

[5] Daily Mail

[6] BBC, 2004, “Gun Gang members die by 24”,

[7] Guardian, “Gang membership spirals among under -16’s”, 09/02

[8] HM Government, Reducing re-offending through skills and employment, December 2005

[9] Howard League for Penal reform, “Imprisoned children trapped in hotbeds of violence” (News release), October 2007

[10] See Brewer et al., “Poverty and Inequality in the UK.”

[11] www.dfes.co.uk