Times article :
More than 30,000 children aged between 10 and 15 now say that they are in gangs, according to research that will fuel concerns about the country’s violent crime epidemic.
Criminals are preying on young people by “taking the place of society”, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner, said as analysis by her office showed that a total of 70,000 youths aged up to 25 were feared to be part of a gang network.
Senior police and experts have told The Times that violence is out of control and children as young as ten are being groomed by drug runners. It is vital that middle-class drug users take responsibility for their contribution to the surge in violent crime, they say.
In the first part of a series investigating Britain’s “lost children”, Ms Longfield said that the pursuit of young people by drug dealers was a “systematic and well-rehearsed business model” that recalled the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.
On Saturday a 15-year-old boy in Romford, east London, became the 77th person murdered in the capital this year and the 50th victim of a fatal stabbing. There has also been a surge in violent crime across England and Wales, with a climbing murder rate and a 22 per cent increase in knife crime last year alone.
Ms Longfield said that the rise in school exclusions was partly to blame for increasing youth crime. Pupil referral units had become a recruiting ground for gangs. More children were being targeted in rural areas as well as big cities, but the risk was being ignored by the authorities. “Parents have told me that police and teachers don’t believe what they are telling them about gangs — it’s still not seen as a countrywide threat,” she said.
She called on Theresa May to begin a “moral crusade” against criminal exploitation of children. “Just like with paedophiles and traffickers, they trap victims into a triple trap of debt, threat, and enticement . . . The children are seen as disposable in these drugs organisations.”
The number of children aged between 10 and 15 being treated for stab wounds in England has increased by 69 per cent since 2013. Children aged ten are being recruited to take drugs from big cities to rural areas as part of the network of “county lines”. One ten-year-old boy was recently found in the park of a provincial town trying to hang himself with his school tie because he feared for his life.
Senior police officers have been grappling to understand the causes of the increase in violence. Olivia Pinkney, the spokeswoman for children and young people’s policing on the National Police Chiefs’ Council, criticised the hypocrisy of middle-class drug users who “have Fairtrade coffee and condemn sweatshop clothes and child slavery and then take recreational drugs”. She said they were “supporting gangs” and “destroying children’s lives”.
Dame Louise Casey, who conducted the government inquiry into the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, agreed that there were clear parallels between the “grooming” of young girls in that case and the recruitment of teenage boys into gangs. “These are vulnerable children, being targeted by predators who make them feel they are part of something,” she said.
Last week Sajid Javid, the home secretary, announced new controls on people buying knives and acid online after a spate of stabbings. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said that the “perfect storm” of drugs, guns and austerity was making violence on the streets “the worst I’ve seen in my 20 years in politics”.
The study by Ms Longfield’s office found that 73,000 young people were self-defined members of a gang, of whom 32,500 are aged between 10 and 15. It used information from the 2013-14 Crime Survey of England and Wales which revealed that 0.9 per cent of children aged between 10 and 15 and 0.7 per cent of people aged between 16 and 24 were involved with gangs. The researchers then extrapolated the data using current population rates.
The Metropolitan Police gang matrix database holds fewer than 4,000 names. The data from the children’s commissioner, however, is thought to be much higher because it relates to self-identification.
The commissioner’s Vulnerability Study, to be released next month, will also highlight the harm done to children exposed to gangs and violence. More than half of the nearly 420,000 annual crimes against children aged 10-15 are now related to violence, it will say.
