I saw their influence on the gangs of young people who came to our church youth club. As adult role models they were encouraging young people to engage in a life of petty crime and part of our youth work was to show alternative role models.
In the late 60s and early 70s I was engaged in full-time youth work in the then notorious Scotland Road/Great Homer Street area of Liverpool. I saw how ghetto communities spawn gangs and violence. I learned the importance of community development and the Community Council we founded still flourishes in tackling issues which lead young people into crime.
I then moved to be warden of a family centre in Canning Town, an area of East London where a young man called Terry Smith, the author of the recent book The Art of Armed Robbery, lived. Terry was a leader in a gang called the "Mini-Snipers", and a member of our youth club. During the early 80s youth unemployment was very high in Canning Town. I was therefore fascinated by this comment in his book: "Somehow we have to drag ourselves out of the gutter and adopt and embrace social and economic improvement. I chose the tools of the professional armed robber, the mask and the gun." Our work at the family centre was involved in a variety of job creation and youth training projects providing young people with other alternatives to the one Terry chose.
"Good youth work needs to be valued" is one of the recommendations in the report of the recent national policy round table I chaired on gang, gun and knife crime (see right).
Other recommendations that make connections with my personal experience are: employment is a key path out of social exclusion and other contributing factors to gang, gun and knife crime; agencies working at both a national and local level need to ensure they consult and engage with a diverse range of local community representatives; the issue of group crime involving weapons transcends ethnicity and occurs across all races, with neighbourhood poverty and unemployment being the underlying causes; while there is a clear role for enforcement and criminal justice responses to gun, gang and knife crime, prevention must feature more prominently.
- Bishop Roger Sainsbury is chair of the executive board at The National Youth Agency.
