Nacro urges preventative work to divert young people from gangs

The call from Nacro comes after a report claimed that the government's response to last summer's riots has resulted in “increasing violence” among gangs.

The report by think-tank Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) said moves to arrest hundreds of gang members in the wake of last year’s riots led to “an increase in violence, chaos and anarchy” because younger inexperienced gang members were left to fill the resulting “power vacuum”.

Nacro argued that a greater emphasis on early intervention with younger children and young people is required to tackle the issue.

Graham Beech, strategic development director at Nacro, said: “What these findings tells us is that by the time a young person gets stuck in a gang it’s all the more difficult to get out.

“We need to intervene early, before attitudes and ties to the gang take hold. What we saw with the riots, and something which came as no surprise to Nacro, was that too many young people who were arrested were already known to the police.

“But enforcement measures on their own do not work. We must make sure the government prioritises services that engage potential gang-members and divert them away from criminal behaviour.”

The CSJ report said that a year after the government’s strategy for tackling gang culture was published, the coalition “appears to be losing its commitment on the issue”.

It claimed that the response, which included a series of raids in February this year that resulted in more than 200 arrests, has created other problems and may have made things worse.

The arrest of key gang members left a “power vacuum” in some gangs which led to an escalation in violence, it said, but not enough is being done to help younger gang members to leave the lifestyle.

“There is a critical need for work to encourage gang members to disown gang life,” the report said.

“We have received concerning reports from professionals that, subsequent to the raids, there has been a lack of follow-up work with the younger, junior gang members who remain.

“They reported that this has resulted in a vacuum in which the younger, and often more volatile, gang members have suddenly ascended into senior gang positions.

“The upshot of this is not only the continuation of gang violence, but its escalation as ‘youngers’ vie for status and respect using the currency of violence.”

Other concerns flagged up in the report include the claim that preventative work has “fallen off the radar”.

One voluntary sector professional told researchers his organisation had been excluded from applying for Ending Gang and Youth Violence money because its work with eight to 11-year-olds was deemed as “too early a stage of involvement”.

Meanwhile the absence of a strategy in primary schools to address gang activity was highlighted as another key issue, with primary school teachers saying they lacked training to spot the signs of gang involvement and gang recruitment processes.

A government spokesman said the Ending Gang and Youth Violence strategy makes clear that the problem cannot be tackled through police enforcement alone.

“That's why a £10m fund is helping to stop the next generation of gang members as well as targeting those already involved in violence,” the spokesman said.

“There's also a new network of young people's advocates to provide direct support to victims of gang-related sexual violence and we introduced gang injunctions for 14- to 17-year-olds.

“There are no quick fixes but we are seeing results. The Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that crime is down by six per cent, and police figures show knife crime is down by nine per cent.”