Adolescents move in packs. The stage in life when they are meant to be exploring possible identities as individuals, able to question and rebel against the truths of their upbringing, is also a time of passionate conformism, when the opinions of a peer group matter more than anything else. This can appear frightening to the outside world, and sometimes it is frightening to the young people trapped within it, too. Mobs of jeering overgrown adolescents, convinced of their own superiority, such as the Bullingdon Club, are pretty unpleasant, but a group of aggressive young people who are haunted by a belief in their inferiority can be worse. In some parts of our larger cities, these groups are known as gangs, but this is a name that now confuses more than it illuminates.
To see all friendship groups of young men as “gangs” is damaging both when the authorities do it, and when the boys involved succumb to the glamorous temptation to see themselves that way. For the authorities, it blurs the very important distinction between criminal gangs, which do of course exist, and ordinary friendship groups, who may or may not be involved in various forms of illegal activity. The crucial difference is that a proper criminal gang has a collective purpose. Its members are out to steal or deal or fight for the good of the group as well as of themselves. This is very different from a loose social network of young people who may commit crimes as individuals, whether they are fighting, taking drugs, or carrying knives. The two pose quite different problems for the police and for civil society and must be dealt with in quite different ways.
The confusion of the two is still more damaging to the young people involved. It gives them a collective identity at a time when they are looking for one, but it is not the identity they want or need. To be a “gangster” reinforces all that is most dangerous and inadequate about their own behaviour. This may be attractive to young men who want respect but who fear they are unworthy of it. It glamorises and normalises behaviour that is much worse than anything they might be seriously tempted towards without it. And it cuts them off still further from the society around them. It has always been part of the mythology of the gangster that, like the Krays, “they only hurt their own”. So pathologising young groups of friends as gangsters makes it seem that both their crimes and the victims’ suffering don’t really matter. But they do. To stop this, and to stop this spreading, we should mind our language. That would be a fitting memorial for Myron Yarde, stabbed in south London this month, and a more helpful reaction to similar deaths that seem all too likely to continue.
