By Himaya Quasem
Assistant to Editor
hquasem@sph.com.sg

 

Amid the looted shops and burnt out cars, one element of the recent riots in Britain stood out as particularly shocking.

Some of the rioters were as young as nine.

Even at such tender years, children in urban areas across Britain are being drawn into a brutal gang culture born out of deep-rooted social deprivation.

While this does not excuse the senseless destruction which has cost at least five lives in Britain this week, it is important to look at some of the underlying causes behind the mayhem.

I caught a glimpse of what poverty in a developed country looks like during a visit last year to a youth centre just down the road from Brixton, one of the London neighbourhoods blighted by violence during the four day rampage.

At the end of every school day, poor black, white and Asian children head to the centre where they are given free hot meals and counselling before returning to their often chaotic homes on crumbling public housing estates.

Nine-year-old Claire (not her real name) told me how she had been sleeping in a deserted, rat-infested garden shed with her mother and younger sister until social services found them accommodation.

But Claire’s problems went beyond homelessness, a worker at the centre told me. Her family had been evicted from their flat after her father was sent to prison for drug dealing. Claire’s mother, who was addicted to heroin and had worked as a prostitute, was trying to get clean. “I really, really miss my dad and I was getting really angry at school, coming here has really helped me to calm down,” Claire told me.

This kind of tangled web of social problems is also blighting the lives of countless children in other UK cities.

Poverty line

More than 3.5 million children in Britain live below the poverty line, one of the worst rates in the industrialised world.

A couple with two children living on less than 288 pounds (S$566) a week would be deemed as being below the poverty line in the UK in 2009.

Single parent families make up an estimated 17 per cent of all households and almost 900 children were suspended from school every day for violence or verbal abuse last year.

Not all the rioters were underprivileged, of course, and criminal greed seems to have played its part.  But the sheer scale and spontaneity of the attacks, and the relish with which some of them were carried out, point towards a tinderbox of social problems which has long been lying in wait of a spark.

In truth, it does not take much to spur some deeply dissatisfied youngsters into a frenzy of violence. In many of Britain’s sink estates, fights between large gangs of alcohol fuelled boys, and sometimes girls, are common.

On weekends, young people in deprived areas are known to literally run riot, using knives, bats, bricks and sometimes even guns, as weapons against peers who live in different postcode zones and are therefore viewed as the enemy.

These bursts of meaningless violence often terrify residents but attract little national media attention.

Politicians have tried to enforce various initiatives to tackle the problem, such as court orders which ban individuals from engaging in anti-social behaviours which range from drinking alcohol in public to gathering in street corners, but these have had limited impact.

That is probably because the problems of disaffected youth, living in areas where there is zero aspiration, are too complex to deal with in one fell swoop.

While working for a British charity last year, I was sent to interview young people in Walsall, an area in the West Midlands where youth unemployment stands at about 21 per cent. Just a few miles down the road in Birmingham, three people were killed during this week’s riots.

I met a woman who ran a community centre and told me she got up at 7am every day to pick up kids from their dysfunctional homes, before feeding them breakfast and taking them to school. If she was not there to do it, many of the children would go to classes hungry or not turn up at all.

Little motivation

In the long-run, however, it is difficult to see how these children will stay motivated at school, without proper guidance and encouragement from their parents.

At the centre I also met 17-year-old Luke, who started stealing, carrying a knife and getting into trouble with the police – all at the age of 14. When I spoke to him he was trying to turn his life around by training to be a youth worker.

In sink estates in Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, I heard similar stories from young men who were trying to turn back from the brink.

Kevin, 17, who lives in Easterhouse, a part of Glasgow where the average life expectancy is 66, told me how he was lured into a gang at a very young age.

“I started getting involved in gang fights when I was 11, because that’s what we all did,” he said. “There’s nothing else to do.”

Where there is gang violence there is also alcohol abuse. In 2008, I interviewed a 10-year-old boy who lives in a part of Glasgow rife with gang crime. He confessed to getting drunk on white cider with friends, but thankfully he said the unpleasant experience had put him off future binges.

“Some of my pals do ask me to drink again, they say ‘go on, just try it’.” he said “But I say ‘no’ because last time I felt really sick and dizzy all day.”

More than 1, 300 children under 16 got in trouble with the police for alcohol related offences in Glasgow last year.

In some parts of the Scottish city, knife crime is one of the leading causes of death among men aged between 15 and 19.

This figure is driven up by the high number of stabbings that occur during gang fights, yet the danger does little to deter young people who feel they belong to a special tribe.

“Being in a gang makes you feel like you are part of something,” said 21-year-old Steven, who became a gang member at the age of 14. “You know they are not really your family, but it can feel like family. It’s to do with upbringing, we are growing up in a culture where gangs are always around.”

A 24-year-old man I spoke to in North Liverpool told me of his feelings of helplessness when he saw a 17-year-old being stabbed to death during a gang fight.
“We tried to get help and save him, but we couldn’t,” he said. “He wasn’t even part of a gang. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

This constant cycle of violence among inner-city youth forms the backdrop to the wave of mayhem that has swept the country. But as well as being the perpetrators, young people themselves can form part of the solution.

Steven, now 21, left gangs after he narrowly missed being smashed over the head with a golf club during a gang fight. He now runs football tournaments to get local children involved in sport instead of gangs.

“I felt I had been given this gift by finding a way out of gangs and I felt I had to give something back,” he said.