{"id":72998,"date":"2024-05-29T00:02:51","date_gmt":"2024-05-29T04:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=72998"},"modified":"2024-05-29T00:02:51","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T04:02:51","slug":"its-between-us-and-gangs-teachers-are-on-the-front-line-against-youth-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/its-between-us-and-gangs-teachers-are-on-the-front-line-against-youth-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s between us and gangs\u2019: teachers are on the front line against youth violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Gang violence and knife crime threaten the lives and future of young people. Figures from\u00a0the Office of National Statistics<\/a>\u00a0show that in London, knife crime increased by 22% in the year up to September 2023.<\/p>\n

County line gangs\u00a0have capitalised<\/a>\u00a0on reductions in youth services, such as cuts to funding for after school clubs, to recruit an increasing number of vulnerable young people to traffic drugs from cities into smaller towns and rural areas.\u00a0Knife carrying<\/a>\u00a0is seen as a required form of protection against rival gangs.<\/p>\n

In 2015, the British school inspectorate Ofsted\u00a0published guidance<\/a>\u00a0for schools, making clear they have a role to play in addressing gang violence. Secondary schools have \u201ca duty and a responsibility to protect their pupils\u201d.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0recent research<\/a>\u00a0in an east London secondary school gives insight into the challenges that teachers are facing in addressing gang violence.<\/p>\n

I worked with six teachers, holding individual interviews and a focus group discussion to discuss their experiences of dealing with gang membership. All of the teachers\u2019 names have been anonymised.<\/p>\n

It was clear to the teachers that some of their pupils were involved with gangs. Hamza noted that gangs were attracting children of an increasingly young age:
\nI\u2019ve been here six years now, and I\u2019ve seen in the last three or four years how it\u2019s getting, you know, worse. At first you think, you know, sixteen, seventeen \u2013 seventeen is the peak offending age. And now we have kids who are in year nine, 14 years old, on the fringes or actively getting involved.<\/em><\/p>\n

The teachers talked about how gangs filled the gaps left when children were by themselves. Rohan explained that many parents had several jobs and worked long hours to make ends meet. In the absence of parents or youth services, gangs could take advantage of vulnerable young people outside school:
\nSo it\u2019s \u2026 the concept is they have no parental control as soon as they leave us, and maybe their parents get back at six or seven. So they\u2019ve got like a three-hour gap of where they\u2019re chilling in the park, chilling in the road. And they have that \u2026 older boys have the opportunity with the boys. And they just get them in that way, say buy them trainers, buy them a top\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Another teacher, Ana, said that gangs offered vulnerable students a sense of belonging, as well as food or material goods. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a sense of community, and they\u2019re like family, basically,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s like if they\u2019re \u2013 if that\u2019s the only person who\u2019s kind of offering you that\u2026 sanctuary, well, immediately, that\u2019s something desirable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other studies<\/a>\u00a0confirm that gangs offer a sense of belonging and act as family systems.<\/p>\n

Research<\/a>\u00a0shows that inequality, poverty, and lack of social and economic opportunities are risk factors for gang involvement. This challenges\u00a0racialised depictions<\/a>\u00a0of gang violence in the British media, pointing instead to the socioeconomic roots of the issue.<\/p>\n

Teachers\u2019 work<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The end of the school day was at a different time to other schools in the borough, so that students would not be leaving at the same time as potential rival gang members from different schools. Teachers acted as monitors at the school gates, and were also required to control violence during the school day. Hamza said:
\nYou know, there was an incident \u2026 a child in my year group a few weeks ago. He\u2019s involved in gangs. He had an issue with another boy in the school whose brother is in a rival gang. They had a bit of a fight. We tried to stop him. We restrained him.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the focus group, teachers described themselves as \u201csecurity guards\u201d and \u201cpolice officers\u201d:
\nAna: [We\u2019re] psychologists, parents, police officers, security-<\/em><\/p>\n

Hamza: Social workers-<\/p>\n

Kate: Yeah, security guard \u2026 It\u2019s quite suffocating, I find. It\u2019s like, you never feel like you can go home and think, right, we did that, that\u2019s sorted.<\/p>\n

Hamza: It\u2019s an unforgiving job.
\nHamza felt that teachers were having to take on responsibilities that went far beyond their role as educators \u2013 and that they were stepping into a gap left by others. \u201cIt\u2019s between us and gangs,\u201d he said, talking of the choices young people were making in their teens.
\nIt\u2019s literally, we\u2019re being told by the government to do all these things that, you know, we\u2019re not trained for, we\u2019re not paid for. And, you know, it\u2019s not our job. But I see the government and the parents, kind of, you know, they take a bit of a backseat. And we\u2019re put on the frontline along with the police\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Schools and teachers cannot address gang violence on their own \u2013 and they should not have to. Rather, whole communities should be involved in tackling youth violence, with the government support they need.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Emma Soye is a Researcher at Queen’s University Belfast<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gang violence and knife crime threaten the lives and future of young people. Figures from\u00a0the Office of National Statistics\u00a0show that in London, knife crime increased by 22% in the year up to September 2023. County line gangs\u00a0have capitalised\u00a0on reductions in youth services, such as cuts to funding for after school clubs, to recruit an increasing […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[434959],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-72998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-gang-violence"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018It\u2019s between us and gangs\u2019: teachers are on the front line against youth violence - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/its-between-us-and-gangs-teachers-are-on-the-front-line-against-youth-violence\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018It\u2019s between us and gangs\u2019: teachers are on the front line against youth violence - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Gang violence and knife crime threaten the lives and future of young people. 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