Some of Britain’s finest cities have been wrecked by looters and violent disorder this week. Much is being said by social commentators, politicians and angry citizens about the causes, effects and what the consequences of such outrageous actions should be.
Attention has turned once more to gang culture, and it’s being seen as a negative. Certainly we’ve seen examples this week of the bad things that gangs can do, but that doesn’t mean that all gangs are bad.
We need to look more at why people join gangs. I suggest it’s because everyone feels a need to belong, to have their existence on this earth recognised and validated. Some people are lucky enough to live in families that provide this validation and make them feel a sense of belonging rather than isolation. They’re increasingly in a minority though, whether through family breakdown or geographic mobility.
As a society I think we’ve got it wrong over the past generation or so. I think the youth service – whilst excellent – has got its priorities wrong. I think that much of my own work on young people’s participation in civil society was looking at the wrong things. We have spent lots of money helping the kids in our deprived urban areas to have experiences they could never otherwise hope to enjoy, trying to compensate for their poverty and perhaps less than ideal family circumstances. But most of these – it seems to me – have focused on the individual, and encouraged more self-interest whilst ignoring the fact that many people want – more than anything – to be involved with others.
I grew up in a family that on the face of it looked utterly respectable and middle class, but internally was quite disorganised, even dysfunctional at times, and I don’t think this is unusual. A high achiever, it still seemed to me that no matter what I did it was never good enough to satisfy my parents. So – encouraged by my family – I joined a series of gangs from an early age.
First there was the Brownies. Then the Guides, the church choir and the youth fellowship. Each of them provided me with a structure, a routine and a sense of belonging and self-worth that I wasn’t getting at home. And of course they gave me an opportunity to mix and spend time with my peers – something that again I couldn’t get at home. But I think most importantly each of them recognised, nurtured and valued my talents.
Those are the things that all gangs are good at. It’s what those gangs do once they exist that is at issue.
As an adult my need for involvement in a gang has grown. As a single woman living alone, hundreds of miles from my nearest family member, I crave the sense of belonging that being a member of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus provides. We turn up week after week throughout the year to learn the pieces we must perform in the Festival each August. Sometimes we really don’t want to be there. Sometimes we don’t like the music we’re being made to learn. Some of us don’t like where we’re made to sit. And sometimes we all hate the chorus master for taking us to task when we can’t get it right (and, to be fair, he probably doesn’t like us much either when we don’t do as he wants). But still we turn up, week after week. Then in August, when we stand shoulder to shoulder taking the applause from a packed Usher Hall, the sense of euphoria in those all-too-brief moments is enough to keep me going back to more rehearsals, to sacrifice the social life throughout the year, to put much of my life on hold for a month every August. I don’t want to let the rest of my gang down by giving less than total commitment, and I crave that precious moment of hard-earned and well-deserved glory.
If the gangs of kids running amok in our streets this week feel even a tenth of what I feel when I’m sitting in the middle of my gang, then I totally get why they’re in gangs.
Our challenge as a civil society is not to close the gangs down, but to find more positive, productive ways to help our young people find that sense of belonging and empowerment and self-worth that is clearly lacking in their lives.
Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of locking up those kids who rioted and looted this week, we found more creative ways of dealing with them? Like sentencing them to join a choir or a dance troupe or the Scouts or the Cadet Corps for a period of time. Force them into different gangs, ones which have the ability to reinforce positive attributes. And enforce those sentences – a community order or an acceptable behaviour order with a difference.
We are already seeing in the UK that culture and the arts don’t need to be the preserve of the wealthy. The El Sistema programme on Stirling’s Raploch estate, bringing music tuition – and providing instruments – to kids in one of the most deprived areas in Scotland, is a fantastic example of what can be done. We’ve seen community choirs built from scratch for various arts projects throughout the UK – the problem with these is that they tend to disperse after the project’s completion – why not find a way to keep them going permanently? We have some fabulous opportunities such as youth choirs and youth orchestras – if only we could find ways of opening these up to children and young people from less well-off backgrounds. We have some amazing individuals who have done and continue to achieve wonders in their field – like my own chorus master, Christopher Bell, who founded the National Youth Choir of Scotland – let’s harness their expertise to find ways of engaging meaningfully with those that are maybe harder to reach but may have most to gain.
Of course we used to have this, at least in the North of England where almost every community had its own brass band, often funded and supported by local business, with the band being one of the focal points of the community, valued and respected, where being a member was something to take pride in. It’s something we’ve mislaid but I don’t believe it has to be lost forever.
This takes resourcing. It won’t be cheap. But if we took the money we’ve been spending on sending kids on Outward Bound courses and the like, and invested it instead in long-term projects that look at developing our young people through sustained and supported group creative and cultural activities, I suspect it would be money well spent.
Very interesting and well thought out post about gangs