HERE IS AN instructive tale for anyone who believes that Britain's youth crime
and gang problems can be solved simply by parents taking a firm hand with
their children. A mother living on a troubled South London estate found
drugs in her son's bedroom. Trying to do the responsible thing she
approached the police. Officers cautioned the boy and confiscated the drugs.
But unwittingly they created a bigger problem. The boy had been due to sell
the gear for a gang “elder”. Now he had to pay the man back twice over - for
the lost drugs plus the money he would have made. His mother told the police
who she thought this gang member was. The next day her son was beaten up so
savagely that he was put in intensive care. The mother was gang-raped.
This is a true story that appears along with many other equally bleak tales in
John Heale's exceptional new book One Blood: Inside Britain's New Street
Gangs. John Heale is a pseudonym. The author, an investigative journalist
and TV producer, has wisely chosen to conceal his identity. Over several
months he has had prolonged access to dozens of gang members, from the
highest ranking to the lowest “youngers” and “shotters” and knows the
penalties for showing “disrespect” or defiance.
As does the teenage boy asked to join the Beaumont gang in Waltham Forest and
do a robbery for them. When he refused they beat him up and raped his
15-year-old sister. Incidents like these expose how fatuous the suggestion
that gang lifestyle is
always a choice that youths can take or leave and that parents have the power
to stop their children getting involved. As Heale says: “The fallacy of
autonomy, the idea that we can separate parenting ability from the
circumstances in which parenting is undertaken, is the cruellest
misconception about gangs there is.”
Heale's style is to weave sociological analysis with the first-hand
testimonies of gang members in their own words. Thus the book's triumph is
the authenticity that runs through every page, the sense that we are up
close with the reality of gang life beyond the headlines - its casual
violence, petty dramas and often mind-numbing banality.
Heale asked every one of his interviewees the same question: have you ever
been on the London Eye? The answer was always no. Gang members rarely
venture beyond their neighbourhoods. A trip to Central London, a Tube ride
away, seems as exotic as a foreign land. Heale says that it's as if these
boys never grow out of the narrow world-view of early childhood, “imagining
unforeseen dangers outside their immediate environment and romanticising
their surroundings”.
Ganglands are frequently mythologised by the media and generalised by
politicians who make glib proclamations about a world utterly unknown to
them. Heale explodes such assumptions and presents a more complex,
unexpected picture of the culture. Such as the seasoned gang member we meet
in the first page of the book - “a witty and intelligent ... black man
covered in expensive jewellery and wearing gold in his teeth” - who tells of
gruesome acts of violence and the huge amounts of money he has made from
drugs.
But the twist is that this man is also a respected youth worker, taking
children on adventure holidays, teaching them how to kayak. Or Heale's
account of Dessie Noonan, a much-feared Manchester gangster, eventually
murdered, who was also, bizarrely, the head of Anti-Fascist Action in
Manchester. That two such disparate sets of values can co-exist in one life
is startling, but frequently the reality.
Heale's research is so detailed that you will not remember all the names of
the gangs peppered throughout - the PDC (Poverty Driven Children), the WK
(Who Kares), LORD (Live or Die) to name three. But you'll find it hard to
forget some of his findings.
Throughout his research he was rarely frightened by the elders: they could be
reasoned with and enjoyed a debate. But the youngers, the 13 and
14-year-olds who we increasingly hear about on the news when another child
has been stabbed, were different creatures altogether, desperate to prove
their machismo. Here's an encounter he had with one, in an outreach centre.
“I shanked a guy last week. Want to know more?” No. “I could shank you. If I
had a knife, I'd walk up to you and shank you in the guts, like this ...”
Silence. “I might just shank you, if you turn your back. Don't turn your
back on me, big man.”
As a policeman tells Heale, it's the young ones he most fears, because a
decade ago getting a gun was what senior gangsters did, but now anyone can
and the rules have changed. Children see a prison sentence or even getting
shot as a rite of passage. “How are you supposed to deal with a ten-year-old
who won't say a word to you until he has his brief there?” the officer asks.
But perhaps Heale's most memorable conclusion is that gangs as we understand
them - as structured organisations with hierarchies and rules - are often an
illusion. It is we, the authorities and the media, who impose this idea. The
truth is invariably more chaotic. Often, Heale says, the “gang” barely
exists at all “except in the way that chemical reactions exist: a mixture of
dangerous elements that occasionally react and then disappear”. This is not
good news.
We assume that there is a natural criminal order, always with a leader at the
helm, keeping others in their place, but it is increasingly a free-for-all.
“The black community, lacking these controlling figures and without this
organisation, is more prone to random acts of crime,” he says. “The great
irony is that the increased violence that comes with this disorganisation
has led to the word ‘gang' being used more frequently in its areas, when in
actual fact it is the anarchic nature of the criminal enterprise that
creates most of the violence.”
There are few things more terrifying than an arbitrary act of violence. How
grim that we thought gangs were the great social evil when the reality may
be far worse.
One Blood: Inside Britain's New Street Gangs by John Heale
Simon and Schuster, £12.99; 288pp Buy
the book
Extract
Junior doesn't want to talk about home: “The fuck you think it was like, bruv?
Mum living off benefits, me and my sister ... you do what you got to do. I
dunno - maybe not even what you got to do, just what you think you got to
do. Mum knew what I was doing ... just didn't want to ask. We've grown up
seeing those brothers with the flash cars with satellites outside their
Mommas' flats ... we know what's possible. One cat across my way's got a
Porsche. A fucking Porsche Carrera. How many fucking doctors can afford one
of those? Every night, in I come. Bang - a couple of hundred on the table.
Yeah, I'm sleeping with a gun under the pillow, yeah I go out and every
night Mum doesn't know if I'm coming home or not, but you do what you got to
do. It's that or ... having fucking nothing wears you down too. But I ain't.
I'm earning serious P's every week. I dunno what I'm gonna do with that
money; it's all under my bed, the paper I'm not spending on bitches and
booze and gear ... till one day I'm gonna be pushing a Porsche too. And you
know what? Most use the other guy's got was driving round the estate
shotting crack. That thing must've eaten petrol even in first.
“School? School just didn't appeal to me. Let me break it down for you as
simply as I can.” Junior's eyes fix me with a deep stare. With every word he
bangs his knuckles on the table. Everyone in the fastfood restaurant is
looking at him, but he doesn't notice.
“That ... cat ... with ... the ... Porsche ... was ... my ... fucking ... education.
How many people in my ends made it through school? Fuck all is how many. All
I saw is guys with their cars, their clothes ... that ain't gonna come out
of exam grades. Least, that wasn't how I saw it. Now, now maybe I think
different. But it's too late now, isn't it?”
In weeks to come I will see Junior more and more, and begin to build a
relationship with him. One day, I ask him if anything he told me the first
time we met was a lie. “One thing, bruv,” he replies. “I don't make half the
paper I made out.”
