London MP: "Youth Services Can Stop Gun Crime"

01 May 2008

The London MP, who was speaking during a debate on teenage knife crime in the House of Commons, pointed the finger at the loss of statutory funding for youth services work, the decline in manufacturing jobs and gaps in education provisions for the recent spate of street violence in London.

Arguing that criminal justice approaches would only get the Government so far Ms Abbott said:

“I have been an MP long enough to have seen during the 1990s the collapse of the youth service as local authorities such as mine came under financial pressure.

We must focus on educational underachievement, especially of young black men and Asian men. The idea has always been that a colour-blind approach is helpful when talking about deprivation and so on, but what has happened is that despite the money that has been pumped into schools in London and so on, young black men and some recent young male asylum seekers remain at the bottom of the education pile. Starved of any opportunity for self-esteem and pride in themselves within formal education, they look for that self-esteem and pride in the negative culture of the world of gangs.”



back ⇢