Just as racism pushes black youth to the margins, poverty pushes
all youth to the outside, where they look in with angry eyes.
One of the kindest and best-mannered lads I ever met
has just been arrested for threatening his mother with a knife.
His future will be written by the heavy hand of a punitive youth
justice system. As a young criminal he will be invested in heavily,
costing the taxpayer many thousands of pounds in legal fees, social
work costs and the massive expense of locking him up in a young
offenders unit, where he will be further brutalised and from which
he will probably emerge prepared and ready for a career of crime.
He will be just another statistic that disproves the lie that imprisonment
reforms or transforms.
Had this boy been invested in when his mother asked
for help, had she been supported instead of being investigated and
then dismissed, his story might have been very different. This was
a family that needed to move away from this estate – far away
– while the children were small. Their obvious poverty made
them objects of pity, disapproval, adult vilification and children’s
bullying. The mother asked for help from schools, social services,
housing officers and charities. While she was not perceived as a
threat to her children or a nuisance to her neighbours, no one wanted
to know. The preventative family support she needed was not forthcoming,
and the response of housing services was to move her from one block
to another on this same estate, considering only the health problems
of individual family members – not the desperate need of the
whole family to live somewhere else.
As with many parents living in poverty, this mother’s
own history of being in care as a child made her resistant to social
services intervention, but more susceptible to it. While she struggled
to cope, the services that should have helped her became a real
oppression on her, adding to her problems rather than solving any
of them. As she sunk into despair and depression, her son struggled
to find a place in this community that rejected her. He found his
place in a gang. He found that to belong he had to ‘do stuff
with my bredren, or I am out and they will come at me’. He
found drugs and drink, very young girls willing to give sexual favours
to establish their own place in the gang and a feeling of being
powerful based on the fear of others. Above all, he found that the
people easiest to frighten were his mother and younger siblings
– and he did.
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