• Issue 2
• Politics and Society

Excluded from school for setting off a firework in a classroom, a 14-year-old black boy grows up homeless. 

Where are his parents?  Where is the social care?  

Now 18, the same boy is treading water just trying to make a living as a plasterer. 

He is not in a gang. He does not sell drugs. He's black, he's poor, he's angry. He's just one of the hundreds of troubled black youths that community workers encounter every day. 

Three black men working inside troubled communities tell The London Project why young black men are angry and why some turn to crime.

While Blair points a finger at black 'gang culture,' and Trident, the Metropolitan police unit for gun crime in London's black communities, publishes its quarterly statistics on gun crime in hotspot boroughs, social care worker Charles Mamatanga (pictured left) says "the system doesn't work, period!" 

Charles says he knows more about these kids than the police.  "Kids with guns are not really criminals."

He says gangs are about family and violence is about respect.  "I can't call you tough if I haven't seen you hitting somebody.  But truth is these kids are scared and they need help.  They are scared to be alone and need protection."

Charles explains the system here ends at the social worker level. "Kids do something wrong, they get arrested and the social worker must assess the situation," he says. "Together with the courts the social worker must decide what happens to these kids."

Coming from Zimbabwe, Charles has noticed a change in African children trying to integrate into UK society. "From around the age of seven, they start losing respect for their parents and gang culture already exists in schools. There is no protection for them there. Some experiment with booze and cannabis then go home, so everybody can be a gang member temporarily, but not necessarily a criminal."

In his experience, children whose parents are already involved in criminal activity make up the core of so-called criminal gangs. 

Therefore, the problem is twofold. The social workers participate in the childrens' lives instead of the parents: "Kids do something wrong, they get arrested and the social worker must assess the situation," says Mamatanga. "Together with the courts the social worker must decide what happens to these kids."

 Viktor Sylvester (below left), 49, a city banker during the day and a street pastor at night, agrees that broken families are mainly to blame for troubled black boys.

Sylvester lays great emphasis on the term 'fathering.'

"Kids need strong male role models. Men learn from other men. There's some really great strong black women out there but a mother can't be a father. What these guys want on the streets is two things: respect and love. They get love from their mothers but they look to their fathers for respect."

Growing up in London in the 60's and 70's he remembers being stopped on the streets for no reason but being black. 

This, he says, has inflamed generations of distrust and resentment towards the authorities: "Policing of black people always seems too heavy-handed and biased."

Sylvester insists that another approach is possible. In one of many street fights, he managed to break it up by reasoning with the two boys. One was ferried off on a bus, the pastor team sang 'Happy Birthday' to him and then they all prayed. "The police would have approached that in a very different way," Sylvester says subtly.  

Most of the young people he meets are disillusioned with life. He says young people go through tough phases and need guidance and encouragement: "When you're talking to seven or eight- year-olds and ask them what they want to be in life, they'll tell you 'I want to be a doctor' or 'a lawyer' or even a 'police officer' but then something happens, they get discouraged and go off the rails."

"People look at me and think I got lucky, but my mum was quite heavy on education," Sylvester adds. "We all have degrees and I think what's happened to young black people today is they don't have the same encouragement I received."

Top image: Modified Enzyme