A colleague of mine was telling me how she wants to get more involved in raising awareness of the dangers of gang culture as a result of recently witnessing a stabbing on a bus by two rival gangs of youth.
Nowadays we seem to hear a new story every day involving a fatal stabbing of a teenager by another young person.
There are so many conflicting reports about teenagers and knife crimes with differing views of what should be done to prevent this happening. The most common crime prevention strategy I hear and read about is imprisonment.
It's the rare voice which publicly asks the bigger question of what actually causes the problem in the first place or is imprisonment an effective solution as government research shows re-offending among young people is on the increase!
There are three main reasons for young people carrying knives:
- the intention to use them;
- peer pressure;
- self-defence.
Within this body of evidence is the worrying statistic that younger teenagers and even pre-teens are joining the trend of carrying knives or offensive weapons.
Dr Clare Graves' work on Spiral Dynamics, based on his fundamental question of "What constitutes a psychologically healthy mature human being?" shows that after survival, the second most basic human need is for a sense of belonging. This is a TRIBAL INSTINCT, going back to our hunter-gatherer roles, in which going around in groups ensure our greater survival. In order for this to work effectively, the gang or tribe imposes rules and hierarchical structures.
This level of tribal instinct is all about people looking after each other. As long as you are in the gang and obey its rules you're OK. So it follows that if young people feel increasingly unsafe and cannot turn effectively to adults to meet this basic need, they're going to look elsewhere.
So when will we wake up to the fact that adults - and not young people - are at the heart of this gang culture problem?
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