Knife Crime Parliamentary Debate

09 Jun 2009

Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington) (Lab): I am very glad to be able to take part in this important debate, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), on the excellent report that he has helped to bring to gestation. I am sure that it will fashion and inform our debate for a long time to come.

It is important in such a debate first to stress that the majority of our young people are not caught up in knife crime, gun crime or gang culture. It is easy to get carried away and criminalise young people as a class, inner-city young people as a class and, even, young people of a certain skin shade as a class. I might shock the House to say that one might walk through Hackney and see a group of gangling boys lurking under their hoods and think that they are plotting murder and mayhem, but they might just as well be on their way to play basketball. They will be quite pleased that people are frightened of them, but they will be trotting behind their mother to church on a Sunday. The media encourage us to jump to conclusions about young people, but we should not, so I want to put on record that, although we have our issues in Hackney, the majority of our young people are not in that criminal sub-culture.

I do not know of many young inner-city men who when shopping up the west end have not been descended on by store detectives, or who have not walked down a street and had women clutch their bags closer to their bodies because they have just assumed that such men are criminals. We have to beware of criminalising our young people in that way. None the less, as a Member for an inner-city area and as a parent, I know that knife crime and the related issues of guns and gangs are very frightening to parents and communities, not least because one can say goodbye to one’s child as they go off in the morning to school, college or their first job, and by the evening receive a phone call saying that they have been caught up in an incident—sometimes quite innocently. That is a frightening thing for parents in an inner-city area to live with, because when the gun, gang and knife cultures erupt, they often touch and harm young people who are simply going about their business.

I want to talk about the long-term issues of knife crime, the medium-term things that we as the Government and society can do, and the short-term response that we need from the criminal justice system. Where does the young man, swaggering around an estate with a knife up his sleeve, thinking that he can demand respect with the point of a blade or a gun, come from? I do not believe that he is the result of listening to music or watching video games. I do not believe that the culture produces criminal behaviour; I believe that the criminal sub-culture produces the music and the games.

Where do such young men come from? They come from families, many thousands of them on estates that I represent in Hackney, where young boys are growing up not just in female-headed households—I would be the last person to say that a single parent cannot be a good parent—but in households where they have never seen men getting up and going out to work, and meeting their responsibilities as men; nor have their friends seen that. When they go to school, most of their teachers are women. As they grow up, their notion of manhood is a vacuum. I was fortunate; my family are working-class Jamaicans, but every day that God sent, my father went out to work, and on a Friday he brought home his wage packet. That was my notion, and my brother’s notion, of what being a man was all about.

There are too many young children on estates in Hackney who do not have a notion of manhood. They do not see people—men or women—going out to work and meeting their responsibilities. As they grow up, their minds are filled with a notion of manhood that is informed partly by popular culture, yes, but partly also by the guys they see on the street with the big cars and the gold chains. They do not know that those guys will have a very short “working” life. They do not know about the downside. All that they see is the swagger, the big car, the gold chains, and the notion that that guy is the one whom all the girls are after. Into those boys’ imagination comes a notion of manhood that I do not recognise, that people in the House do not recognise, and that my father would not have recognised. That is the notion of manhood to which those boys aspire.

Justine Greening: The hon. Lady makes a really good point. Often, when such people see role models, they are celebrities; they are out of reach. They need to see role models who are within reach, and who have realistic lives that they can achieve and aspire to.

Ms Abbott: That is right. The notion of role models is often misused. It is not a question of pulling in people from outside a community and saying, “Look, you can be him.” Young people should be able to see people who are recognisably like them, and recognisably part of their lives—people who are leading the sort of lives that, a few generations ago, inner-city communities took for granted.

As I say, the process starts in the home. When the children whom I am talking about go to school, increasingly teachers are finding that some of them have not been spoken to. That is a curious thing. When I was growing up in the working-class West Indian community, the one thing that a person could never complain about is people not talking to them; people talked to us the whole time. However, in some of the communities that I am talking about the mothers are watching television or listening to their iPods. When such children attend school for the first time, valuable time is lost just socialising them—teaching them how to use a knife and fork, and how to work co-operatively. That is at the heart of some of the educational failure that we see further down the line.

I believe that the long-term origins of the social dislocation that leads to gangs, guns and knives is in the home. That dislocation starts with young women who, although they may love their children, do not know how to parent them. Their idea of parenting them is having them dressed up in designer clothes from top to toe. When my son was at primary school, he was constantly complaining that the other little children had a lot of expensive designer stuff. Their mothers were on benefit; I was a Member of Parliament. He could not understand why he could not be in designer clothes, but that was the limit of those girls’ notion of parenthood.

In the summer holidays, when I took my bus pass—I am not a driver—and took my son to reading schemes in the library, or youth projects in museums, or whatever a person could take a little child to on a bus, I would often find that I was the only ethnic minority parent there. It is not that other minority parents in Hackney do not care for their children, but their notions of being a parent are limited. They perhaps come from cultures where the child would have been brought up collectively by aunties and grannies. Instead, they are isolated on some estate, and the aunties and grannies are not within reach. The parents are thrown back on to their own knowledge, which is limited.

I take the view, I am afraid, that my Government’s emphasis on putting single-parent mothers out to work is wrong. Some of those single-parent mothers need first to be taught to be decent parents. Once they have been taught to be decent parents who are at home when their children come home from school, it will be time to talk about sending them out to work to stack shelves.

I have set out some of the issues relating to home life that I believe form some of the rootless, valueless young men who grow up to be involved in gangs and knives. The answer to those problems is long-term; there is no question about that. We have to look at our policies on work, and look at how we support parents. We have to look at how we work with the Churches. I admit that I am not a regular church-goer myself, but often the only bastion of order, values and boundaries in inner-city areas is the Church.

I have set out the sort of home life that some of the young men in question have. Having said that, I can show hon. Members families in Hackney in which one young man will tread the straight and narrow and be a credit to his family, and another will be in gangs. For three years I have run an awards programme for top-achieving black children in London. I remember that in the first year we gave an award to a young boy from Somalia who had been brought up on the Chalk Hill estate, one of the toughest estates in Brent. He had been to state schools, but on leaving state school he was able to go to the university of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and graduated with a first. His brother was a gang member. Having said what I said about home conditions, individuals are individuals, and we should always account for that. I have mentioned family dislocation. We are talking about cultures where, generations ago, children had been brought up by an extended family network, but people now find themselves isolated on estates without that support.

I want to move on to some of the medium-term issues, and I want particularly to focus on education. I was struck by something that a past director general of the Prison Service said: on the day that we permanently exclude a boy from school, we might as well give him a date and time to turn up in prison. I am not saying that educational failure is an excuse for criminality. I am saying that the statistics show a clear link between educational failure and exclusion on the one hand, and criminality on the other. It stands to reason that a boy who is in class studying for his AS-levels is not wandering up and down estates in Hackney doing what he should not be doing.

I have paid a lot of attention and spent a lot of time on issues of educational failure, and I believe that we have to focus on particular communities in a laser-like way. The danger with some of our education programmes in the inner city is that it is children from the more motivated families—often quite middle-class families—who get on the “gifted and talented” schemes. Quite gifted, intelligent, talented boys get pulled in another direction. Let us remember, some of the boys in gangs may do dreadful things, but they have tremendous qualities of leadership and tremendous skills, and often have tremendous ability. The problem is that we are not intervening early enough to direct that energy and charisma and those leadership skills in the right direction.

For more than a decade I have organised a conference on education; it is called “London Schools and the Black Child”. Every year, I get 1,500 black parents and teachers to talk about the issues facing our children. Hon. Members should never believe that inner-city parents are not concerned about their children; they are concerned. There is more that we can do to tap that concern and encourage them to understand that the school system is on their side.

As I have said, I also run an award scheme, and the House would be amazed to see the children from some of the toughest estates in London—black children from state schools—who get 10 As at GCSE, and four As at A-level, and who study medicine and go to Russell group universities. As I said right at the beginning of my contribution, knife crime and gangs are a terrible problem, but we should never forget how many of our young people—young black and Asian people—even in the inner cities achieve extraordinary things in the face of adverse circumstances.

I believe that education is key, but this is a home affairs debate. However, I could say more about the need for a teaching work force in London who look like London; the need to recruit more black teachers; the need for more male teachers at primary school level; and the need to target different groups quite specifically, which I mentioned. It is no good talking about ethnic minority children. The needs and the results of a Chinese child who lives above a takeaway, a third-generation West Indian child, a first-generation African child, and a middle-class east African child are very different. Those children perform very differently academically, so I believe in targeted intervention and education.

Finally, I want to talk about the criminal justice response to issues of knife crime. Some Members have mentioned the importance of longer sentences, but what deters the young people involved is the certainty of being caught. The focus on sentencing is a problem as we try to fight against the gangs, guns and knives. It makes the public feel good—“Put them inside and throw away the key. Give them 10 or 20 years.” However, the point is not the length of the sentence, but the certainty of being caught.

Mr. John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD): I thank the hon. Lady for giving way, and I agree with what she has said. The all-party group on child and youth crime, of which I am a member, is looking into knife crime at the moment. When we spoke to young people, they said to us that it did not matter what sentence they got if they were caught. They felt that they had to carry a knife because they felt safer. The fact that they were then more likely to be the victim of knife crime was irrelevant; they felt safe carrying a knife. Whether the sentence was one year or 20 years made no difference to them. The issue was all about whether or not they felt safe.

Ms Abbott: I agree entirely with that intervention.

I shall draw my remarks to a close. The inter-agency working under Operation Blunt, and its capacity to intervene early, has been important. The use of knife arches and other such measures is also important. Knife crime may involve only a minority of our children, but it strikes fear into the hearts of communities and parents. Education is significant. There is a fallacy that carrying a knife makes someone safer; in fact, it puts them more at risk. We do not need only to educate young people; too many parents allow their children to take knives from home to “defend themselves”. The answers are multi-agency working and more education—and, where necessary, measures such as knife arches and targeted stop and search. Those measures are important.

It is wrong to stigmatise a whole class, generation and cohort of young people. However, knife crime is a serious issue and we have to consider the short-term criminal justice measures. It is important for us to do more to protect witnesses and to make it easier for them to be anonymous if they need to be. Recently, I had a meeting with the Secretary of State for Justice about possible changes to the court process to make it easier to ensure that when gang members are caught, they go down. There is no more important disincentive to a gang member than the notion that they will actually go down; the issue is not about the length of the sentence. Criminal justice measures can be taken.

We have had successes as a Government, but knife crime is emblematic of what has gone wrong for a generation of our young people. I do not want to sensationalise the issue, as some of our media do, but nor do I want to underplay it. The Government have done good work, but there is more to be done—particularly, as I have said, in considering the long-term social context of the problem.

 

 



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