DIANE ABBOTT
This week I had an intriguing conversation with a young woman who shone a light for me into the world of gangs. Specifically she explained about the emerging role of women in gangs.
Gangs, violence and the related problems of knife and gun crime have long been top of the political agenda in Britain. The public is frightened of the frequently mindless violence associated with gangs. They are linked to the growth of drug crime.
There is also much concern about the growing influence of gang culture over increasing numbers of young people in our inner cities. In Britain, gang members can be any colour. Despite all the talk about gangs in London, Glasgow has long been a bastion of the gang culture in Britain and remains the city with the highest level of knife crime in the country. And of course in Glasgow all the gangs are white. In other big cities there are Asian gangs, Turkish gangs and even the notorious Chinese Triad gangs. But much of the media discussion of gangs in this country features black gangs, as if gang culture is a uniquely black phenomenon. So, for many reasons, I have long taken a keen interest in gangs.
The young woman I spoke with was light-skinned, attractive and had recently completed a university degree. I will call her Michelle. Michelle had spent many years as the girlfriend of a leading gang member in my own district of Hackney in East London. Michelle herself lived in a respectable area a few miles from the boundaries of my inner-city constituency.
The gang leader she fell in love with happened to move in next door, but his gang was a leading one in Hackney and that was his stomping ground. She described how protective he was towards her. He would send her home when episodes of extreme violence were about to happen. He largely kept her out of his gang’s territorial zone. He limited the extent to which he involved her in actual crimes. Speaking softly, Michelle talked about the sense of status and material benefits that she derived from the relationship. She spoke openly about how she would demand increasingly expensive designer goods; compare him unfavourably with other gang leaders to encourage him to commit more acts of criminality and how she would goad him on to acts of violence. She also explained how the acts of extreme violence associated with gang members (rapes, mutilations, unprovoked attacks on the elderly) actually enhanced their attraction to girls. She explained that, the colder and more heartless the girls knew the gang members to be, the more powerful the girls would feel as the only people to whom the boys revealed their “softer” side. Michelle even explained that she felt a little guilty because, whilst she had been able to move on from the gang world and go to college, her lover was now in prison.
Interestingly, she explained that girls in gangs divided into quite separate groups. There were girls like her who were the girlfriends of gang leaders and had a measure of protection and respect. There were girls who hung around gangs, frequently because they had a drug habit, and who would have sex with anybody. There were “equal opportunity” gangs where girls were members with the same status as boys and who took a full part in all the violence and criminality. And then there were all-girl gangs who rivalled the men for violence and brutality.
This conversation was a window onto a world about which most of us know nothing. I was particularly struck by the extent to which the taboos which had inhibited an earlier generation of criminals did not trouble these gang members. Michelle described a world in which young gang members thought nothing of stabbing a pregnant woman in the stomach in an unprovoked attack just to show how “cold” they could be. She explained how some mothers were terrified to report their sons and their friends to the police because they knew young gang members would find them and submit them to brutal gang rape.
It was a sobering conversation. You are left wondering how some of our communities have spiralled down to this level.
