The desperate plea of a London mum whose gang member son ended up in A&E with stab wounds has stayed with me. “How much worse does it have to get before someone helps?” she asked. She had been told repeatedly by the people supposedly there to protect children that nothing could be done to help her boy. She was scared her son would end up as a headline, and so was I.
A year ago I told the Evening Standard street violence could only be tackled if everyone stopped blaming each other and worked together. Since then, more children have been murdered and the same arguments rage about police numbers. Meanwhile, that mother in A&E still needs help to keep her son safe.
Smart and targeted police operations against those who commit and commission serious violence need to go alongside prevention work. Last week I published research estimating there are 27,000 children in gangs. Thousands more children know gang members and have themselves have been involved in serious violence in the past year. The ruthless older criminals who groom and exploit them call them “collateral”.
If gang leaders can find these kids, so can we. Yet only a fraction are known to children’s services, despite growing up in poor housing, amid domestic violence, drug or alcohol problems, or with poor mental health or special educational needs. Many are excluded from school. They are ripe for exploitation.
It is terrifying to see the same mistakes made in towns such as Rotherham over child sexual exploitation repeated with criminal exploitation. When I asked 25 Local Safeguarding Boards in “high risk” areas what they knew about the number of children involved with or at risk of involvement with gangs, it was clear that few had a grasp of the scale of the problem. That must change — and summits and committees aren’t enough.
We need GPs, mental health services, schools, police, community groups and councils working flat out to identify and protect these children. I would like to see a troubled-families worker knocking at the door of those kids most in danger and working with their family until they are in a better place. The quality of provision for children excluded from school must be improved. Some pupil referral units are doing good work. But some are, in the words of one PRU head, “gang factories”. There is also no getting away from the fact that councils need more cash for youth and early-help services for children. Too many struggle to provide even the basics.
The West Midlands Police Commissioner was right to call this a national emergency. Let’s treat it as such. When knife crime spiked in 2002, Cobra, the Government’s emergency committee, met and well-funded programmes were deployed. Knife crime fell. No child involved in gangs or violence deserve to end up as a headline. We can provide the escape route they need, but only if there is the political will to do so.
- Anne Longfield is Children’s Commissioner for England
