Inspire, don't condemn

Despite days of unrest in his own district of Lewisham, London youth worker Patrick Regan tells Deutsche Welle that young people must be inspired, not condemned. The author of "Fighting Chance: Tackling Britain's Gang Culture" says authorities must invest far more in promising community initiatives such as mentoring to persuade youth to avoid a life of crime and develop their educational potential.

Deutsche Welle: Have you been shocked by the scenes in London and elsewhere in England this week?

Patrick Regan: I don't think anyone can fail to be shocked when you're sitting there, looking at kids taking TVs - and not just kids. This isn't representative of young people in Britain.

You're looking at 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds going in, parents taking stuff and giving it to their kids. We really need to separate the criminal element - justice needs to be seen to be done - and the young people who are getting swept up into it. There are so many opportunists; seeing it on Twitter, seeing it on the news, and seeing if they can get some stuff. So, it's far more complex than is often being realized.

You've written a book on gang culture in Britain. Has it exposed this sort of gang culture that perhaps few outsiders previously associated with the UK? Is London turning into some form of Los Angeles?

I don't think it's like LA. When I was writing [my book], I went to LA and I interviewed the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), the Mayor's office, the Freedomize Institute, Homeboy Industries - all the big organizations dealing with this issue. They all said to me, 'You know, in London you think you're just like LA. You're not. Somebody gets shot [in LA] on a weekly basis, sometimes on a daily basis.'

But, then they said this - that was really interesting - they said, 'If you don't tackle the "drivers" to why kids get involved in gangs in the first place, you could go a similar route. But, if you do tackle the drivers, you have a fighting chance to solve this issue.'

So what are those drivers?

It's a combination of things that often work together. What often happens is a young person could be in school, they get excluded from school, they go to what's called a pupil-referral unit, which is meant to get them back into mainstream education. That often doesn't work. And so they are hanging around. They are living in a challenging, poor area. Mum is working multiple jobs. There is no man around, or, the man that is around isn't a dad. He's just like a guest who comes in for six months or so and then disappears.

Then a guy says to them, 'Here is a couple hundred pounds. Take this envelope, which is drug money, to this place over there.' And they look at this guy and think, 'You know what? He's got respect. He's got girls. He's got a nice car.'

You can see, it becomes very tempting for some of these young people to start stepping into that world. Added to the high unemployment that's going on at the moment - one-in-five 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are going to be out of work - when those things combine, we have a serious problem on our hands.

There's been a lot of talk about Britain's underclass this week …

I don't like the term underclass. I know what people mean, but I think there is that challenge for people. I mean, people who live in poverty, we are told statistically now, are more likely to stay in poverty more than any time since the 1960s. That does have a huge effect.

I deal with young people here at XLP, the charity that I run and founded, and they say to me, 'It's weird when you're walking on a [housing] estate and you're looking at the City of London, you're looking at what other people have, and you see your mum struggling. You've got friends who have been killed. It makes you angry.'

One of the things we're doing at XLP is that we're mentoring young people. We are providing them with alternatives and we are showing them that there is a different way.

I've got a young person with whom I've been doing some media interviews. He was told at his school that he was going to end up in a dead-end job or in prison. With a bit of mentoring and a bit of training, he went on to get three A's in his A-levels and is now heading up sport within XLP, the project that I work for.

So, change is possible. I've often said, hopeful kids don't join gangs. Hopeful kids don't riot. You are not born angry. Something obviously has gone wrong. That's why we need to have long-term solutions that tackle the drivers of those issues.

Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a hard-line police response, which seems to have worked in the short-term, but as you say, that's not a long-term solution. The prime minister's government has cut back social programs. What needs to be done in the long-term to fix this problem?

You have to tackle the drivers. You're going to have to work with the organizations that live in the communities. That's the one thing I always say. We live in the communities of the inner city, so we must have an incredible knowledge of the issues in the inner city.

We have tailor-made solutions, but we can't do it on our own. I said to the deputy prime minister [Nick Clegg] yesterday: 'You need to help us. You need to help some of the good practice, things that are going on on the ground that are changing peoples' lives. You need to help us be able to scale up.'

There's a real issue of role models here. We did a scheme a couple of years ago where we took 20 kids, all on the verge of exclusion. We recruited 20 volunteers in the local community and said, 'Give them two hours a week, life coaching, support them, text them, get to know their family, help them create life goals.'

After a year, 18 out of those 20 kids are still in education. One went back to Africa and one truly dropped out. Ninety percent of them had refrained from antisocial behavior.

So it shows that change is possible, but you do need to invest in the right places and take a long-term view of it.

Interviewer: Chuck Penfold / ipj
Editor: Martin Kuebler