I hadn’t expected to be impressed when I arrived in a drizzle at a dingy youth club above a shabby public library, located across from a launderette on a bleak and windy housing estate in the South London district of Southwark.
Just before I entered, a couple of middle-age drunks fumblingly helped each other to pitch and roll into the nearby Canterbury Arms pub. As I was in Southwark, the words I had learned by rote as a schoolboy from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” surprisingly resurfaced:
“I’m quite drunk, I know it by sound./ And therefore, if I slander or mis-say,/ Blame it on ale of Southwark, so I pray.”
It sounds better in Chaucer’s Middle English. Which, for all its guttural sounds, is more pleasing than the drill rap booming down the youth club’s stairs. With each footfall as I climbed, I was mentally preparing to encounter aggressiveness and incoherence.
But quite the reverse greeted me.
I was there to discuss the current epidemic of stabbings and killings on London’s streets with local teenagers, some of whom have links to street gangs and others are seen as “at-risk.” Violent crime is spinning out of control in the British capital. London’s homicide rate reached a decade high last year with 133 violent deaths, 76 of which were from stabbings. The Metropolitan Police recorded 40,147 offenses involving a knife or bladed weapon in the first three months of 2018 alone.
The two hours of conversation with a dozen inner-city youngsters, ranging from the age of 10 to 24, was, to my surprise, full of eloquence. They demonstrated an impressive grasp of reality as they explained their family circumstances. They showed an unsentimental understanding of their plight as they detailed the finer points of London gang culture, including the role rap music plays in fueling the violence to the selling of drugs and how “gangstas” build a street reputation to attract a following.
They explained how many kids join gangs for reasons of self-protection — they will automatically be seen as a gang member anyway by rival gangs just because of the housing estate they live on.
But above all, the kids I saw expressed a poignant determination to escape the fate that geography, broken families, their own low self-esteem, poor schooling, poverty, and social status — or lack of it — may have conspired to shape for them. Several of them acknowledged self-discipline is key.
There’s barely a day now that my inbox doesn’t have a press release from London’s storied Metropolitan Police detailing the latest stabbing.
On Jan. 8, I was alerted to the killing of 14-year-old Jaden Moodie. He was butchered in a frenzied and targeted attack by three assailants, who first used their car to knock him off his moped in east London and then stabbed the teenager several times before racing off.
Jaden had only recently returned to the British capital. He and his mother had come to London to give him a “fresh start,” and a youth worker who knew him said he was a polite boy who was mapping his life out. “He wanted to go down the construction, painting, and decorating route. He looked like he was going to have a new start in London and do something amazing,” the worker said.
Instead, the lad had a rendezvous with death.
As I read about Jaden, I thought of the youngsters I had met with just before Christmas in Southwark. Of the pretty 15-year-old girl aspiring to be a videographer — “That’s my passion,” she said — who’s trying to find a camera now that the media department of her school has been shuttered because of spending cuts.
I recalled the confident and determined 24-year-old gangsta-turned-trainee-youth-worker who’s liaising with counterparts in Baltimore about how to wean away from the gangs’ self-harming, self-medicating members, who are all just a flicker away from aggressive outbursts that can quickly escalate into unbelievable violence.
And then there was the 14-year-old who has hopes of a professional soccer career after having been admitted into Chelsea Football Club’s youth academy. As I hear their voices now, I pray they prove to be more successful cartographers than poor Jaden.
