:: Farrukh Dhondy

A daughter’s pledge for reform of youth

By Farrukh Dhondy

Nov 21 : "…friendship, love, infatuation, fascination,

arrangement, blackmail, bondage, coercion, boredom, habit, nemesis… 'relationship'…"

From Bachchoo's Thesaurus

My brave daughter works in London's badlands as a "youth-worker" and insists that the cynical thugs she deals with, whom I have learnt from the media to regard as the nemesis of urban society, are actually misguided children. She may be right.

Her job in the London Borough of Haringey, where many immigrant communities, the Somalis, Albanians, Turks, Algerians, Nigerians, Afghans, Pakistanis etc. reside (but where don't they in the entirety of London which is 35 per cent "ethnic"?) is to get the knife and gun gangs off the streets and into activity. This could be simply coming into a youth club and being introduced to pastimes and challenges more productive or at least safer for their fellow-burghers than hanging around the streets looking for people to mug or members of a rival gang to stab or shoot.

Further than that, she and her team aim to put these boys and girls to useful activity acquiring a skill they can professionally use and it's part of the job to put the waifs and strays in touch with an agency that can solve their drug/mental, health/social welfare problems.

Daughterji was going away last weekend with a group of these recalcitrants - her "clients" - to some part of the country for a four-day sojourn in a state-funded outdoor camp where the lumpen youth volunteer to go to be taught canoeing or diving or some other challenging activity which will take their minds off crime and the depression of the ghetto and perhaps instil in them interests and ambitions beyond it. It's an extended and vastly more costly Baden Powell programme for the bad 'uns, but without the pseudo-religious promises that Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have to make.

They do make promises, however. My daughter, before she went, was working on the computer, growling frustrations with its tendencies and shouting out words for which she wanted the spellings. I asked her why she needed to spell "statutory".

"I am typing out forms for the clients to sign", she said.

"What forms?"

"Oh, just to say that they are not carrying any guns or knives on them or in their luggage. They have to give us that undertaking before they get on the coach."

This is the sort of cool answer that turns my stomach. I suppose the parents of young men and women who work in the active wings of a police force or as soldiers in a war zone constantly get this feeling. I have had to get used to the idea that my beautiful and dedicated daughter is in one of the "front-line" services of this society. Nevertheless, it gives me pause.

She presses the "PRINT" button and turns to me with a grin, reading my frown.

"It's better than searching them and going through their baggage like security guards because that doesn't give out the same message does it? Here we are handing them a form to sign and asking them to take responsibility for not carrying harmful weapons and demonstrating to some degree that we trust them."

"They may not be trustworthy! If stabbing and shooting is their game, signing a false guarantee is not going to seem a terribly dishonest thing to do."

"Well, put it this way, dad, if they are carrying knives or guns they are hardly likely to use them on us, are they? They use them on each other."

She was quite cheerful about it. Off she went carrying her forms. The same evening, picking up the London Evening Standard, I read the headline which said a 16-year-old boy had been stabbed at a bus stop by a gang of youths. Not, however, in the Borough of Haringey. The report says that the police claim to have reduced knife crime in the capital by a quarter. Which simply means that instead of 400 incidents brought to court, there have only been 300, which is three hundred too many.

A sinister sounding statistic now emerges. The Metropolitan Police have made it their policy to stop and search children as young as 10 and 11 for knives. They claim they confiscate a large number, one which they won't disclose. They report the children to their families and to the social services who may take up the thread of prevention from there. The police also claim that this stop-and-search operation is responsible for the fall in the stab-rate. They don't ask the suspects whom they stop to sign any forms. They search them from curly locks to boots and I don't suppose it inspires great affection for the police patrols who do it or great respect for the uniform. There is enough evidence to indicate that it does exactly the opposite.

The civil rights lobby in the country wants the police to take a less suspicious approach and stop the stop-and-search and instead try and win the hearts and minds of youth. They protest that it's a suspension of civil liberties. But like being searched before getting on a flight, it is a very annoying but necessary evil and won't lead to more people carrying knives on the street. It may alienate hearts and minds, but if it's contributing to safety on the streets, bring on the alienation!

One borough of London, Croydon and not Haringey, more harassed by youth crime on the streets, has trebled its placements of CCTV cameras. These are the snoop cameras that watch the streets and public spaces in the borough and are strategically placed where youths tend to congregate. The move has inevitably brought about complaints against the surveillance society and protests from the same lobby of civil rights watchers.

British cities are, square foot for square foot, the most surveyed cities in the world. The Croydon spokesman was convinced that the cameras would capture "anti-social" behaviour and would act as a deterrent. I can see that it would deter burglars without balaclavas smashing shop windows in the high street, but would it stop desperadoes carrying knives in their trousers or guns in their cars? Perhaps my daughter's solution is as effective as police searches or surveillance cameras. Get everyone to sign forms.

Build trust, build an honest society? Perhaps not.